Here they are: the OryCon 41 Souvenir Book and Pocket Program are ready for you to read and enjoy.

Annnnd both proofs are now done. I always want to see a printed copy. There was a miscommunication on the Pocket Program cover alignment. All should be fixed now and we're good to go.

Souvenir Book gave me doubts about color correction around 6am before turning the files into the printer. But then I pulled up old files of past publications and compared them to the printed results. Confidence was reinvigorated and the files were submitted. They turned out perfect. Take that Doubt Demons! Printer was awesome and gave us some extra copies of the cover so we could hand them out as thank you posters.

I just mailed the OryCon 41 Souvenir Book off for review. Minor tweaks planned for next week, no problem. Now it's time to make dinner, get the kids ready for bed, and get a good night sleep because it's time to start the big beast of a Pocket Program first thing tomorrow morning.

I'm also a big fan of how the layout of my table of contents page turned out. #designnerd

The Artist Guest of Honor, Rob Carlos, is known for his creation of dragon portraits. For this year's OryCon Rob created a special painting inspired by the theme "Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations." An early version of the painting was captured for us to use in our promotional materials. This is a poster that I put together to advertise the convention. The completed painting will be on display in all its glory in the OryCon Art Show. Come to the convention to see it in person.

Files uploaded, proofs approved, we’re good-to-go! I've compiled all the files, made low-res exports, and uploaded them to the gallery (view web PDF copies of the Souvenir Book and Pocket Program).

Latest painting. Not bad given how dark the room was. I had to fix the birds a bit at home because the lighting was so poor that I felt like I was painting in the dark. They are still crappy little birds, but whateva', overall the painting did what I wanted it to do. At first glance it is a rather sweet winter scene with birds and snow. That is, until you notice the sinister smiles of the snowmen.

“Maybe it’s snow that fell before. Maybe it’s snow that remembers how to make snowmen.” – The Doctor

Files delivered, proofs approved, the Souvenir Book and Pocket Program are off to press. I've compiled all the files, made low-res exports, and uploaded them to the gallery.

My goal for the Souvenir Book this year was to focus on the general content of the convention; giving information relevant to people new to OryCon as well as long-time veterans. I also wanted to spotlight the people that make OryCon a unique experience; including full color pages for the Guests of Honor, more photos of members throughout the book, featuring panelists by programming track categories, short bios for panelists (if provided), and extended text about charity organizations that partner with OryCon. Listing the panelists by category was new and a ton of work. We didn't have existing reports to create those lists so I had to do a lot of scrubbing manually. In the end, I think it was a pretty neat feature. It looked really good and I hope people like it.

My goal for the Pocket Program this year was to provide a pocket sized book that contains all the details of the convention programming. I wanted the book to be a single source of information to find panels (date/time, location, description) in both grid and text formats; with a compromise between making the text large enough to be legible and the book small enough to be portable. My intention was to make this the book you carried around the con; giving you easy access to hours of operation, quick reference programming schedules (readings, concerts, autographs, panelist locators), maps, fan groups, dealers coupons, policies, and local area restaurant information. I upped the page count (from 80 to 104) and we moved to a spiral binding. It's the cheapest print media we have so I am hoping that more content (like paid ads) can be added to it over the years.

Another success this year was reworking the ad pricing and focus for our printed pubs. I evaluated the purpose of the ads we print (2/3 of our ads are swaps or for charities) and decided that this year our mission is to support the convention community instead of trying to make money. We analyzed the cost per page and set fan/non-profit ad rates to nearly at-cost. As a fundraiser, however, we offered the premium space of our inside front and back cover at a premium price and we sold one! I also created layout options for half page and coupons in the Pocket Program. In the end, even though we cut costs, we nearly doubled last year's ad revenue. Plus, the ads are more focused on the community of the convention.

OryCon needed a generic ad for situations where we're doing a swap but the latest convention information isn't ready yet. I've made this a full page but will also make a half page and maybe a quarter page too. A web ad probably wouldn't hurt as well.

This version of the ad is updated with just a bit of the O37 information we have right now. Photo credit goes to Phil Whitehouse.

It is that time in the production schedule to make ads for everyone. Westercon69 needed a new full page ad to be used for a flyer and I had to create a half page version for the OryCon36 publications. Not exciting stuff but it needs to be done. /smile

I needed to make one last ad for our Westercon 69 bid (published in the Westercon 67 program book). I had been thinking about it for days, trying to think of something that would be striking in black and white, use images that we already have, and incorporates our logo. I came up with the idea of using keywords from the website and used one of those word cloud generators to pull text from the website text. I then pared the list down and started playing with the layout. It was a bit of random luck when I placed the logo into the document that it got tossed onto the text and I really liked the moon effect it created.