Interesting to talk to actual graphic designers about pages

Hey Andy!

Two questions.

#1: When you say apply optical margins, do you mean allow the text to go slightly beyond the stamp box? Because I would be in favour of that in the above example.

Especially with these US issues where they love to issue single stamps, I'd want to treat each stamp + description as a logical box and then align the boxes on the page. So the text could extend wider, while still having padding between logical boxes.

#2: When you say decrease the size of the box, do you mean the box dimensions or the thickness of the outline? If you mean the box dimensions, you pretty much have to compare with stamps and mounts installed, right? It's tough to look at a blank page with reduced images and picture a completed page.

Personally, I'd play with wider text boxes and centre justification, making the width of the text some proportion larger than the width of the stamp. Especially if your row has a mix of vertical and horizontal stamps (ie, portrait and landscape) Playing with space between words and letters seems to be a sucker's game, because you'd be playing with every stamp or every size of stamp at that rate.

Another option, which I use for sets over singles, is to put the descriptions below the set. You might treat the row of stamps as a logical set, and then have a line per stamp for a description underneath the row.

Well, and a final thought. If I'm a thematic exhibitor (and I'm not, but I read about them!) then I want the amount of text to match the size of the object I'm describing. So if I want to write a paragraph about Katherine Hepburn, I need to find a copy of the stamp on cover.

Maybe a very brief description under (or above) the stamp and a biography on the facing page is the way to go if you want to tell the story that is within the design.

I mount my stamps double-sided, with a piece of glassine paper between pages.

I think my 2008 US Stamp Album Supplement will come out tomorrow. One thing I learned is that you can get 90%-95% of the way there very quickly. I use PostmasterGS PMGS Stamp Album Page Generator for Scribus to do all my pages. And that saves me a TON of time. That gets me 90% of the way there and I can use that tool to generate a supplement (once I have all the information entered into the spreadsheet) in about a half hour.

But, then. you need to do the cleanup and start tweaking. You need to adjust spacing between stamps. You. need to center everything on the page. You need to go through every description box and make sure there are no widows and orphans or large gaps between words. That can take quite a while. I would says for every supplement, you're looking at about 4 hours of total tweak time to get it to look just right.

Then the embarrassing parts happen:

1. I print out the stamp pages and my wife proofreads them. She finds all sorts of stuff I screwed up. Typos. Incomplete sentences. Stupid punctuation mistakes. Then I go back and make corrections.

2. Then I print out the pages and test fit stamps. And I can't tell you how many times I measure a stamp in a mount, but type in something that's not even close to what I measured. I don't know what the hell I was thinking. So I have to go back and re-measure and make corrections. Then my paranoia makes me reprint the pages I fix and test fit everything again.

Scribus 1.4 had a great feature where you could display a ruler on the screen. You can then put a real ruler against it and adjust the ruler till the two matched. That was great, because I could test fit stamps right on the screen of my computer and not waste paper and ink. Sadly that went away with Scribus 1.5.

If you want to design pages as per what is generally accepted as "beautiful", in my opinion you have to bury much of the established "dogma" found in our hobby.

The Mystic pages are a good example: They are absolutely horrifying.

Personally, for my specialised pages with explanatory text, I found it impossible to combine "functional" with "beautiful" using just one page. Hence why I use the left side for any corresponding text.
For my speciality albums, I want them to feel as a book.

The collections that look like reference book are nice and should be preserved in a philatelic library.

For me:

• Borders - I can take them or leave them. I tried fancy borders and anything that looks too busy doesn't work for me. A simple one or two line border is OK. The Scott Minuteman border is OK also.
  
• Page size - I really like the larger size of the Scott pages. But I don't understand why Scott insists on such huge margin. You can fit an entire US Letter page inside those margins.
• Stamp Images - I don't really need them, unless the country uses a different alphabet than the Latin alphabet.
  
• Catalog numbers - I want to see these after the stamp is mounted. I know a lot of people don't. I've had a few requests on my website to remove the catalog numbers. I always tell people "The Scribus files are there. Go ahead and remove them."
  
• Paper color - I prefer a cream colored paper, because it's easier on the eyes. Though I like the white paper color that White Ace uses. It's not very bright. I used to like a super bright white paper. But it's REALLY harsh on the eyes when you stare at it for a while.
• I like thicker paper for my pages. I don't want it as thick as cardstock. But it needs to be thicker than regular 20 lb. paper. I like the thickness of White Ace paper. Scott National paper would be a minimum acceptable thickness.