A lovely pleasure that any thinker, parent or mature person has is gaining the opportunity to share their knowledge, or wisdom with others.
Assuming that we care, we all want to teach our children what we have learned in life, so that we can give them the best start we can.
As we mature, age and retire (or make moves in this direction) we can also seek to share our expertise.
“The Jewel” is an example of this when I took my capacity to design, write, photograph and publish material into a private classroom environment.
This 20 page book resulted from my efforts to put this all together for students wishing to learn the trade for themselves.
* The book cover show here, for example, can be broken down for the observant:
* The background is a map of the Wanganui river area – greyed and faded out;
* The “Jewel” is a fancy script font, curved, blue with white border, 3D and drop shadow;
* The “the” is red, lower-case with white border superimposed over the primary title word;
* There is no subtitle and the primary photo has an uncluttered look with an ‘Autumn’ river;
* An angled Mt Ruapehu photo has a sharp line of the sunset, white border & drop-shadow;
* An older-looking black & white photo of local legend Peter Mcintyre has no drop shadow;
* The Author’s name is a plain black font, Arial Rounded, bottom right as all my books do.
Most would never look at a book cover in this much detail but the individual design components are important to create an overall impression for a cover that must tell a story. Indeed you SHOULD be able to tell a book from its cover. Photographs, old and new; beauty, nature and history, all relating to the Wanganui region combined with thoughtful layout should all flow from this cover throughout the book, which indeed does occur.
TIP 25:
Google’s image finder can locate images by comparison & this will often reveal the original source. File names often contain the time & date taken and a page source or JPG meta data can reveal the photographer or other sensitive info.
This book resulted from a single trip to a property located in the central North Island town of Kakahi and a three hour photography session of a property for sale on the banks of the upper reaches of the Wanganui river. I used it as a template so that students could use it to develop their own products, photographing and then writing a resource on a topic of their choosing.
I have found that over the years all my skills have developed but keeping my attitude right is key – I have fun doing everything. It is when I teach others and help others to get their story out though, that I gain the most satisfaction. What’s your story?
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