Lucian Marin
I wrote a book
Sourcefabric organized a book sprint near Berlin, where an international team wrote a book in just five days. The book is a manual for getting started with creating templates and using Newscoop to its full power. Newscoop is a content management system (CMS) specialized for news sites, magazines and mass-media publications. Of course, my theme “The Journalist” has already been ported to this new CMS.
The book
The Newscoop 3 Cookbook can already be ordered from Lulu and will be available for free on FLOSS Manuals. I wrote a full section describing the best practices for designing websites, where I talked about template grids, the golden ratio, typography, and article and comment design for Newscoop. I also wrote a few other sections, on Facebook, HTML5 and best practices for SEO.
I designed all the diagrams used in the book, in a black and white style on math paper. I tried to simplify and clarify every step shown in each diagram. It’s not as easy a process as it seems: you have to conceptualize the whole process first, then create each step displayed in the diagram. Of course, the team helped me where I got stuck, and in the end I managed to finish them all.
The team and the place
Each member of the team came from a different country: New Zealand, the USA, Romania, Belarus, Serbia, Colombia and Germany. We stayed at Schloss Neuhausen, where a few black cats entertained us and blossoming trees put some light on our faces. I’m not sure if it’s important, but I got the biggest room, and I enjoyed every moment spent there.