The home stretch!

Alright, the book is almost done. No, seriously, it is! The wheels are in motion to get the ebook and print book completed within the month. 

Because I'm self-publishing this whole shebang, I had it in my head at the beginning of the project that I would make the ebook formats, typeset the print book, and handle everything myself.  After all, I'm genuinely curious about the technical process of making ebooks, and in a former life I handled quite a bit of print design work. But alas, my ridiculous travel and client schedule finally made me realize that I simply don't have the capacity to go this alone, and that I should leave this stuff to the pros.

So, I've enlisted the help of a pair of Rachels! Helping with the ebook side of things is the incredible Rachel Andrew. If you don't know Rachel, she's an absolute powerhouse, running the CMS Perch, talking about grid layout, curating a CSS layout newsletter, amongst seemingly a billion other things. I'm so in awe at how productive she is, I had to ask how she does it all. I'm truly honored to have her help with the project.

On the print side of things, I now have the help of my friend and Pittsburgh-based designer Rachel Sager! In addition to being a tremendously nice person, Rachel is an amazing designer. Her 100 days project last year produced some incredible work. Rachel's going to typeset the book and get it ready for print. Being that I'm going to try to get things printed here in Pittsburgh, it will be great to have a professional print designer show me the ropes.

The timeline to get things shaped up and shipped out is about a month, so if you've preordered the ebook, you can expect a download link soon-ish. Once the print version is complete I'll link it up in the shop. I still need to crunch the numbers on the cost of printing, so I don't know how much the print version will cost, but it's worth repeating if you preorder the book you'll get a significant discount on the print version.  Food for thought.
 

Killing Wireframes
Even though the book is all edited and ready to go, I ended up adding a few additional paragraphs to chapter 4 about wireframes. I've been working on more projects with Josh and Dan, and as time goes by we're getting closer and closer to killing traditional wireframes in our process.

Of course it's important to figure out what goes on the page and in what general order, but that doesn't necessitate a bunch of bulky wireframes that make a ton of layout and technical assumptions. Instead, we've had great success using the lowly spreadsheet to demonstrate what goes on a screen and in what general order that info should be presented. 



You can read more about lo-fi techniques for establishing direction in Chapter 4.



Thanks
Once again, I want to say thank you for your patience. Writing Atomic Design in the open has absolutely been a great decision, but it's definitely tough to manage people's expectations. So thanks for sticking with me throughout the process!

That's it for now. As always, you can follow along with project updates here. And if you would like to support the project (and haven't done so already), you can preorder the book here for $10. If you have any questions or have any feedback for me, feel free to contact me via email or on Twitter. Thanks again for supporting Atomic Design!