Getting Started

Before making my first PDF, I read about page layout and graphic design; The Non-Designer’s Design and Type Books taught me a lot of fundamentals at large and small scales, and various sites online chimed in about grids for page layout, style guides, and branding (I still have yet to crack open Brand Against the Machine, though, and Amazon tells me I bought it two years ago).

As part of branding I chose colors (“Stumpy Green”, a pale blue, and originally “Hugs White” but that was replaced with true white), developed my logo (which took a long time, and then a quick inspiration, and then another long time), and chose fonts: Janda Elegant Handwriting for my logo and Rotis Semi-Serif for my pattern text (you can also see it in the header image on this blog). Overkill perhaps, but I wanted all the pieces in place as though I were a huge company, because then they will all just be there as I proceed.

I also needed an appropriate program. As a former mathematician, I first turned to LaTeX, but I simply couldn’t get it to easily do what I wanted in this case. I like open source as a philosophy and also wanted to minimize my start-up costs, and the combination led me to Scribus, a desktop publishing program. More on all the software I use has already appeared here; I’ll just mention that it took me some time to discover the existence of WooCommerce. I actually found it by reading 1-star reviews of a different WordPress e-commerce plugin, where someone said they wished they could have a do-over and use WooCommerce instead.

Layout and Style

At this point I had some ideas about good page design, wanted a grid for consistency with flexibility, and wanted a style guide for additional consistency. I also realized that the standard portrait-oriented full sheet of paper could be improved upon (in my obviously not-so-humble opinion) for sitting in a chair and stitching. My patterns are on landscape-oriented paper split into two portrait-oriented halves. They will spread across a lap or can be folded in half and set on one leg or on the arm of a chair.

A lot of work I’ve mostly forgotten went into setting up a Scribus template. First I did a lot of arithmetic; I wanted square photos to fit neatly, not just horizontally but also vertically. Scribus allows you to align your lines of text to a baseline grid, which has adjustable distance between lines (baseline skip) and offset from the top of the page. I worked with the baseline skip as my unit of measurement, so all of my column widths are multiples of that, the gutter between the columns is one baseline skip, and the center margin is three. My grid system is one larger and two smaller columns in each half of the page, with some horizontal guides as well for aligning images. The columns can be combined into two or even one larger column (which they typically are; I’m not sure I have a single pattern that uses them all separately).

The first half of the first page always has the title, main photo, description, materials list, stitch abbreviations and conventions, and logo. It usually has the copyright statement as well, but that can be shifted around if it helps pattern readability. Somewhere else in the pattern is a boxed paragraphs pointing the stitcher to the pattern page for additional photos and stitch instructions. The very top is the same on each sheet: green bars across the top with the pattern name, ReveDreams.com, and “Sheet X of Y” (fortunately Scribus can fill in the appropriate numbers automatically, so I don’t have to tweak this).

As for style, essentially I tried to be very consistent when I made my first five patterns, recorded all the details, and have been (mostly) abiding by and extending that style guide ever since. It covers capitalization, hyphenation, bolding, indentation, punctuation, crochet instruction conventions, and perhaps most importantly, what all I want to include in every pattern. It also has my Scribus page layout information in case I should ever lose it.

Pricing

Now we’re at the last major hurdle. How to price? I first went around to look at some of the major amigurumi designers’ prices, so mine would be in line with the market. They range from $7 down to $2, essentially, and I went through a number of schemes for my own patterns. Price based on whether the pattern makes one item or two? Price based on size of finished item? Price based on difficulty? Finally, during one of our long car trips to visit my family, I thought of pricing based on the length of the PDF. That way, patterns that are more complicated or make larger items automatically have higher prices than patterns that make simpler, more repetitious, or smaller items. It doesn’t necessarily reflect the amount of effort it took for me to develop the pattern, but it’s at least correlated.

I make my patterns self-contained for the intermediate crocheter, with additional material for beginners accessible from the pattern page in the shop, and I am as concise as possible without sacrificing clarity. My actual pricing formula, heretofore unrevealed, is $1 plus $2 per sheet of paper, calculated to the half-sheet. That’s actually a little flexible; I think of my educational materials as $1 per sheet, though all of them are name-your-price, and sometimes that slips in to lower a price that strikes me as a little high.

All decisions (well, almost all) about pricing are taken away, and hence also stress about decisions about pricing. It would be easy to change should I decide inflation has raised the fair price of a pattern, and meanwhile is in line with the market average: my fixed-price patterns are between $3 and $6, with an average of exactly $4.50.

I think that’s all the major decisions that had to be made. I’m very comfortable with my system; it is still time consuming to get a pattern from brain to store, but having a template makes it a lot easier.

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WordPress is the obvious starting point, a beautiful content management system that is infinitely customizable. My theme is a slight modification of the included theme Twenty Twelve, called ReveDreamsSpecial. It is a child theme, but barely so, since it changes the header but otherwise only changes the CSS, which I could do to Twenty Twelve directly. Should I ever want a dramatically different-looking custom-designed webpage, I could keep WordPress as the basis, because it is built for such flexibility in the presentation of content.

Along with WordPress I use WooCommerce for my shop. Technically this is a plug-in, but it’s so extensive it doesn’t feel like it should have that designation. However, its plug-in status means it integrates seamlessly with WordPress, including in the sidebar and menu contents. There are additional plug-ins for free or pay that extend WooCommerce with various payment gateways, customer interface functionality, ability to sell subscriptions, etc.

In the background I have three programs used for working on images and pdfs. Scribus sees the most use; it is a page layout (desktop publishing) program. I use it to make my pattern pdfs. It allows me to put text boxes and image boxes wherever I want them while maintaining alignment of text baselines and so forth, can input vector graphics, and has (very) basic image editing abilities and shape-drawing options. I can set up a whole template of margins and guidelines, and tweak positions and measurements down to the fourth decimal place in a variety of units of measurement. It can be crabby sometimes, but I love that it does not require Mac’s X11 program to operate.

The remaining two do require X11: Gimp and Inkscape. Gimp is well known photo editing software that I used to clean out the gray behind Stumpy in my header image. I don’t use it too often (typically I am at the depths of the editing I know how to do with iPhoto’s options), but it is my go-to when I want to make a photo collage or similar. My most recently acquired Gimp skill was how to make an animated gif.

Inkscape is a vector graphics program, and in it I made my logo, as well as a graphic of stork-shaped embroidery scissors and some embroidery stitch diagrams. I haven’t quite grasped all the uses of vector graphics, I think, but I feel good having grasped the basics of creating them.

This page would be incomplete if I omitted some non-open source components. I mentioned iPhoto, and I am also a big fan of TextEdit and Preview on my Mac. I must admit I’ve been considering buying Pixelmator to replace both Gimp and Inkscape with a Mac-native program, especially next time I want to make stitch-instruction diagrams. The script letters in my logo are Janda Elegant Handwriting by Kimberly Geswein, and the title and byline text are Rotis Semi-Serif, which is also the font used in my patterns. I’m a fickle web-browser user despite the annoyance involved in switching from one to another, but currently use Firefox.

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