Book creation has gone through revolutionary changes in the past few decades. For 400 years, publishing and printing technology remained the same, with innovations beginning in the 1800s, as a result of the Industrial Revolution. Since then, change has been more frequent.

See my blog on the history of graphic design.

I began creating layouts in the 1970s with the technology of that time: the “mechanical” aka paste-up. We used illustration boards, ink pens, blue pencils, T-squares, and Xacto knives to assemble the parts that make up a page. One board for every page.

When the Apple-Macintosh computer arrived in 1984, my studio was in Santa Cruz, California – next door to Silicon Valley. Graphic designers and printers in my community were the early adopters of the new desktop computer and the first layout program: Aldus PageMaker. We developed new methods and new layout techniques and the software grew with us.

Fast forward to today. I use Adobe InDesign for layout and book creation. It’s a downloadable software that requires a fairly expensive annual subscription and because of it’s cost, innovations keep coming. Today I learned of a free page layout program, Scribus (https://www.scribus.net). I think I’ll try it out.