Engineering a Photobook
For over two decades, I worked as a software engineer in California's Silicon Valley, designing and building software for tech companies. My products ranged from medical ultrasound to videoconferencing to image-editing software. Ten years ago, I left the software profession to pursue my passion for photography and writing. I started making photobooks about Bangladesh using the photographs I take.
Software engineering seems far from making photobooks. But are they really that far? I discovered that several principles of engineering helped me in my new endeavour.
Software engineering requires technical know-how and creativity. For making photobooks, it's the other way around! The end result, in either case, is a product that is, in some way, useful and attractive to the customer.
So, how do engineering activities translate into bookmaking?
Design: For a software product, its appearance and ease-of-use to the customer is crucial for success. Similarly, when I am designing a photobook, I think of the reader's experience, from the time they first lay their eyes on it, open it, read it, buy it, give it or receive it as a gift. Do they want to touch it, open it, look at it, flip its pages? Or does it bore or intimidate them? Do they want to pick it up a second time?
Schedule and budget: In the world of software, the ability to accurately estimate length of work, and deliver accordingly, is a sought-after skill that I had worked hard to learn. I treat bookmaking just like a software project and make a schedule for each book. Both activities are susceptible to feature-creep, so a non-negotiable deadline is important. Outside one-time expenses, the budget is dominated by the cost of printing the book.
Dependencies: No man is an island; neither is any project. A piece of software usually depends on other pieces done by external people; and so for my books. I must plan and negotiate so that the dependencies are aligned to my schedule.
Review and test: Software must be tested repeatedly to find mistakes as it approaches finish line. Fixing mistakes become costlier and riskier towards the end. What happens if you introduce another mistake while fixing one? In case of my books, I seek help of expert reviewers early on to read and find mistakes before the books are printed in the press. And while I try my utmost to find and correct mistakes, I accept that no book is completely free of errors. My goal is to avoid egregious or embarrassing ones.
Beta-test: Before software is delivered en-masse, it is given to selected customers for trial. This process, called beta-testing, incorporates customer feedback for a better product. In the world of books, this is hard to do. I keep trying using different methods such as print-on-demand and making dummy books as prototypes, but am yet to find a satisfactory answer.
And the result? Only the reader can decide!
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