Design
Cover Page
Create a cover page image. For a basic cover page, you can pick a background color, place an image on the top or bottom half of the page, and place the title in the remaining space. You can use free software like GIMP to create images. Canva, another graphic design option, has a limited free license, is more user-friendly, and as a networked platform is less secure than GIMP.
First consider if there are any images related to the content of your work that you could use. Check institutional collections. Archival collections are often full of textual records, so it can take patience to find illustrations or visually interesting documents. But using them creates meaningful covers.
CLIR (Council on Library & Information Resources) staff created the cover page of Archivist Actions, Abolitionist Futures using an image from an archival collection showcased in the publication. The cover of Good Practices for Acquiring Email Archives includes an image acquired from the University of Nevada, Reno’s special collections of students using library computers in the early days of email.
Maybe your research is on a new topic, or maybe centering historical relevance is not part of the project. In publishing with Educopia, we often created a cover page using an image from a free or low-cost stock photo collection. The Creative Commons search portal searches across several platforms of CC-licensed images. There are many free stock image collections including Unsplash and Freepik. Vecteezy has vector images, open source illustrations. Visualize a metaphor for your publication. Search keywords that exude the vibe of the project or a metaphor for it.
After selecting an image, credit the creator and take any further measures required by the image’s license. For digitized archival collections, most institutions try to provide as much usage information as possible so that you do not have to contact an archivist for permission, but you may, depending on the institution’s policies and the image you have chosen.
Layout and Typesetting
Layout and typesetting are significant challenges in DIY publishing. There are very few open source or free software solutions for doing this task. In my community publishing projects, either someone on the team had access to Adobe products through their institution, or the host institution used desktop publishing software (usually Adobe products) to lay the publication out. If you are using a platform that only one person can access, the work shifts from everyone having access to the infrastructure to make direct changes during writing and editing, to working through one designer during layout.
Layout and typesetting may involve considerable copying and pasting, reformatting, wrestling with hierarchical lists, and inserting links. Consider accessibility as you select designs (a full accessibility review should be performed after design). Be patient with the team member or institutional host staff leading this work, and give them an extra big thank you at the end!
One “free” option (that requires significant labor from the team) is to design your own publishing template. A markdown template is useful because it can work in many different systems and static website generators. It is easily converted to PDF or HTML through free software such as pandoc.org. A Google Doc template can also work well. The Librarian’s Guide to Micropublishing13 includes extensive guidance on how to establish specifications for font size, character and line spacing, and many other aspects of layout for writers using Microsoft Word.
See the Platforms section for more information on selecting layout and typesetting software.
Accessibility Review
Remediating for accessibility may introduce minor text errors, so conduct an accessibility review after the layout is complete but before proofreading. Section508.gov has extensive guidance on how to develop accessible documents in a variety of different formats and how to apply universal design to your outputs, including specific free tools you can use to help you perform the accessibility review.
13 Walt Crawford, The Librarian’s Guide to Micropublishing.
