Why Choose Chinook?
We like paper. We like empty paper, and we like filling it with the right combinations of color, type and images. We genuinely enjoy the transformation from unformatted text to attractive, readable, professional document.
We can do what you need:
- We create books and journals: typesetting, layout, indexing, figures and illustrations, covers, dust jackets
- We are not prejudiced. We will take on any kind of book project: fiction, poetry, science, history, dissertation, atlas, cookbook ...
- We do periodicals: scholarly journals, magazines, articles, editorial workflow
- We beautify CDs, DVDs and packaging: labels, inserts, booklets, boxes
- We promote: posters, signs, fliers, brochures, cards, calendars, invitations
- We help you communicate: reports, pamphlets, documentation, letterhead
- We transform author manuscripts: give us your document and we'll turn it into a fully-formatted book or article that meets your publisher's specifications.
- We prepare images to reproduce at the highest quality and can retouch or fix (when possible) damaged images
- We work with you and your printer/bindery to make sure they get exactly the files they need
Chinook Design has been working with books, periodicals and other printed material for years. For most of the last decade we have been responsible for the production of a biannual scholarly journal (typesetting, format, illustrations, maps, and more) and a series of scholarly monographs (all the same tasks as the journal, plus indexes and dust jackets). We've also been creating posters and promotional materials, CD art, artist's books, t-shirts, and just about anything else that can be printed.
Please see our portfolio: http://chinook.tumblr.com
Working with authors
Our experience has made us very sensitive to the needs of authors. We've worked with hundreds of book and article manuscripts, as well as the accompanying maps, illustrations, photos, charts, bibliographies, appendices, indices and footnotes. We are good at understanding what authors want their work to look like but we know that it's best to be sure, so we communicate with authors throughout the process. If we see something that might be a mistake, we'll ask before we correct it. If we see a way to make something (whether it's a sentence, a chart or a map) more clear, we'll offer a suggestion. We can scan your images for you, and can redraw maps and retouch damaged images if that's necessary.
Many publishers are cutting costs by firing designers and requiring authors to submit camera-ready copy. It is very difficult (some would say impossible) to produce professional-looking text in standard word-processing software such as Word. That sort of software is not designed for that sort of work. We take your documents and convert them to software which is intended for publishing, then format them to exactly meet your publisher's specifications.
Working with editors
Chinook Design plays well in any editorial workflow. Editors can pass submissions to us for initial formatting, then edit the formatted files, or can do all the editing and then give us the files for conversion and formatting. We'll also gladly handle all the front and back matter in a publication. We can create templates to fit any publication. If necessary, we can take back issues or previous titles and use them as a basis for an up-to-date template and group of styles.
We are experienced at communicating with printers and making sure all files meet their specifications. If there is a problem with a file, we will fix it. Your project will come out on time.
Less expensive
Don't pay your printer/bindery to handle your complex content. Chinook can do it as well, or better, at less cost. We know that many smaller publishers do not have the time or money to invest in purchasing and learning new software that would enable them to work with complex scripts and diacritics or properly create and handle high resolution images. That's what we do. Going through multiple revisions with Chinook before sending your publication to the printer will be much less expensive than finding and fixing problems in the printer's proof.
Unicode and complex scripts
Because many of the books and journals we've been involved with require complex scripts (such as Arabic and Persian) and tons of diacritical marks, we specialize in working with Unicode and tricky typography. We have extensive experience converting documents from legacy (outdated) fonts to Unicode and mixing left-to-right and right-to-left scripts in the same text. We can, when it's allowed (and we will find out first whether it is), make modifications to fonts. If the font you love is missing a character you need, we'll work it out.
Software
Chinook Design uses Adobe Creative Suite. We can work with CS2 or CS3 files in InDesign, InCopy, Illustrator and Photoshop. We use the version that has Middle Eastern language capabilities built in, but you won't notice that (unless your project has Arabic, Persian or Hebrew in it, in which case you'll be glad we do). We also have MS Office, of course. When OCR (optical character recognition is needed for scanned text, we use ABBYY Finereader and/or Able2Extract. Both give excellent results.
Revisions
We are willing to make revisions, even after we have completed and been paid for a project. Major changes to a project, once we have begun working on it, and especially after it has been completed, may incur additional charges.
Cost
Pricing can vary widely from project to project. For books, we usually charge from $2 to $5 per page (but we can also estimate the fee for the entire job). An estimate is just that. Until we see the text and other components involved in the book, we can not give you an exact price for the job.
If your job is a poster, CD art, packaging, or something else that doesn't have pages, we will price the project as a whole.
How much a given job costs depends on such factors as the overall complexity of the text and layout, the number of illustrations involved and the amount of work required to get them ready for publication, the size of the job, what we are delivering, and so on.
We're not greedy. We will not charge extra for small tasks that crop up unexpectedly.
Some expenses (such as font purchases or shipping costs) must be billed to the client.
Contact us to request a quote. The more information you can provide at the outset, the more accurate our estimate will be.
