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 actually a manual for getting started creating templates and using Newscoop at 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” is already ported to this new CMS.
The book
Newscoop 3 Cookbook can already be order from Lulu and will be available for free on FLOSS Manuals. I wrote a full section describing the best practices for designing websites. Here I talked about templates grids, golden ratio, typography, article and comments design for Newscoop. I also wrote a few other sections regarding Facebook, HTML 5 and best practices for SEO.
I designed all the diagrams used in the book. I used a black and white style on a math paper. I tried to simply and clarify every step showed on each diagram. It’s not an easy process as it seems. You have to conceptualize the whole process and then create each step displayed in the diagram. Of course, the team helped me where I got stucked and in the end, I manage to finished them all.
The team and the place
Each member from the team was from a different country. New Zeeland, USA, Romania, Belarus, Serbia, Columbia and Germany were the countries that we originate from. 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 each moment spent here.