On the Road to Frankfurt with Booktype

Booktype has been out for about 3 months now and a lot has happened since then. We met at Sourcefabric coffee lounger, betahaus, to meet and talk about the next months and plan the way forward for communicating what Booktype is and what it can do.

One thing we realised over the last months is that we need to improve the design process. Booktype outputs books easily but taking control of the design can often be tricky for people who have no experience working with CSS to design books. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) are the design language of the web and designing books with them is not something many people are familiar with.

So, on the road to improving this process we also realised we are on the road to the Frankfurt Bookfair... so why not combine the two and improve the design process by working on books with people and take these books to the Frankfurt Book fair to show off.

So first port of call - I talked to De Waag who had approached us about using Booktype to house the free version of Open Design Now. De Waag are a pretty famous design / dev house if you havent heard of them. This connection came from Remko who attended the Amsterdam Booktype workshop a few weeks ago. We discussed the issues and complexities of Open Design Now's book design. They know that Booktype needs work to deal with complex layouts but they would like to work with us to help solve these kind of issues.

We invite you to join us on our journey. Follow Booktype on Facebook or check back here regularly for more updates!