When we were approached by a local English writer to produce an anthology collection of her short stories, we started with a little trepidation. We had previously developed software to interface with Adobe Indesign, and used this to produce the html to upload on the Ruido Magazine Website. It should not be a big step to take this software and modify to it to produce the most common eBook formats.

So first we took the stories, and in effect created a book in exactly the same way as we would if we were preparing it ready for print, it this point we could produce a fully print ready PDF. At this stage in the process we extract a lower resolution web PDF for devices that don’t handle the eBook formats.

With the layout completed in Adobe Indesign it was time to take our software and gently massage it to produce the required output for eBooks. Most software solutions for producing eBooks make a vague attempt at creating the elements such as table of contents and navigations. With our software we endeavoured to ensure that all these features were supported and fully functional.
We produced both the 2 main supported formats of epub and mobi.

We then check the produced eBook and refine the layout to ensure that the text fits to the required formatting, one aspect that was difficult with this book is that one story is represented as a series of letters and the formatting on the addresses was difficult to achieve within the limitations of the mobi format.

The book is available in all 3 formats from the authors site or in kindle format from Amazon

A local English writer was preparing to start up a small independent Publishing house, mainly to publish her own work in ebook format. She approached us to design a logo for her publishing business “Dragon Tree Publishing”. Our starting brief was to produce a black and white logo featuring a dragon tree.

The Dragon tree is a variety of tree that is indigenous to the canaries and somewhat endangered. They are not strictly trees not having growth rings and only produce branches each time they flower. So a Dragon tree transforms from a thing that resembles an gigantic loo brush when it is young to what looks like an old oak tree from a distance when old, in steps each time it flowers. More information on dragon trees can be found on La Palma Island

I set about gathering reference photos of local Dragon Trees, as well as ones on other islands, in including one on Tenerife that is reported to be over 1000 years old. From these images I produced the following set of silhouette images that were sent to the client.

The client felt that although silhouette 1(the 1000 year old tree) was probably the most famous Dragon tree in the islands, it’s silhouette was less recognisable as a dragon tree and that the best representation was tree 2. At this point I suggested to the client that the addition of a dragon to the logo would possibly enhance the portrayal, as the dragon tree is restricted to the local area and not known wildly, the combination of dragon and tree would portray her company name better.

I went for two possible styles of dragon – both more stylised than say the typical Chinese or historical dragon. One option used a heraldic design with spread wings, the other was more of a cartoon style dragon. These were placed with several of the dragon trees and again sent to the client for her to chose the variant that she preferred. These variants were not finished items but digital sketches produced to allow the client to decide on the idea that she preferred for her logo. The one shown below was chosen as the final design.

The finished logo is shown here.

This design was done in adobe Illustrator, which is a vector drawing package. The advantage of this over a raster (pixel) type package like Photoshop is that the resultant illustration/logo can be easily reproduced in almost any size without degradation in the image.

We also provided the client with business cards, a website banner, and a T-shirt design utilising this logo.