If you don’t own one of Lloyd’s books you are really missing out! Check out the link below and buy all three at 40% off. He takes great photos and his books are wonderfully packed with beautiful hand built structures he finds on his travels. These are the type of places you aren’t going to find info about on the internet, well unless you follow Lloyd’s Blog. But even then his books go far deeper. His update below is about his latest highly anticipated book on Tiny Homes which is well under way but not done yet. His last book was Pacific Coast builders I think in 2004?? Could be wrong on the date but It’s my favorite book, maybe because I love the coast of the Pacific Northwest, anyway I digress.
Excerpt From Lloyd Khan’s Blog:
Here’s what’s happening at Shelter Publications and environs at this moment, day of our lord April 3, 2011, with sunny Sunday morning blue skies and warm days after cold rainy months. The hills are verdant green, with Spring life pulsating, creeks rushing, ground soaked deeply. It’s the month of my birthday, and I feel energized.
Tiny Homes book It’s extraordinary. This book is evolving daily. Some of the best material is coming in right now. Just last week a small group of artists and homebuilders creating unique shelters on a piece of land in France; we just did 8 pages on them. “France is the California of Europe…” says our friend Paula.
The best and most unexpected thing about working on this book is that so many of these builders say they were inspired by our books, going back to Shelter (1973). Boy! Plus our books are being discovered by a new generation.
We’ve got a thread of continuity running between
Shelter, HomeWork, and
Builders of the Pacific Coast. (Shameless commerce dept.: we’ve been selling the set of 3 for a 40% discount:
http://is.gd/3shelterbooks).
We’re in full gear production now, have maybe 155 pages (out of 228) done in rough form. We just changed the publication date to February 2012. Got to do it right. It’s gonna be a beauty, is all I can say. I have the feeling that I did with Shelter, back in the ’70s, that we were plugged into something vital and current. There’s buzz.
This time it’s about figuring out a way use your own hands to get shelter over your head without getting tied up with a bank (or landlord) — we’re talkin freedom here! Maybe not right away, but some (especially young) people can move in this direction…
Daily routine. I’ve been getting up early (mostly), trying to get biz stuff over with and then, work on the book. Gotta snatch those precious moments to do inspired layout. Caffeine, ganja, B. B. King’s Bluesville, no phones or email, I can never tell when things will smooth out and I can put pages together.
Our layout process: I have a big drawer full of files of buildings and builders. When I finish two pages, I look through it and pull out a file to work on. Pretty random. I figure out what size I want photos, and print out (on paper) on a color copy machine. I write or edit text in Word, print it out (on paper) in 2- and 3-columns, and do pasteup with removable Scotch Tape. Yes, yes, I know, but tell you what: I do a different layout physically than I’d do on a computer. Using eyes rather than mouse seems one step closer to layout art.
Sometimes I’ll go over and over a page; I re-did the pages on the French builders at least 4 times. I save up a bunch of scotch-taped, written on, drawn-upon 2-page spreads, then artist David Wills comes out on a bus from San Francisco and adds a master touch of design (manually as well). They then go to Rick Gordon for InDesign and Photoshop work. Lew Lewandowski is in on all of this. The four of us have gotten to working really well together. We’re a book-making team.
Here are a few rough layout spreads before going to Rick. Remember, these are scotch-taped together crude color photos with scotch-taped text. Colors are all wrong. But you get the idea. Hi-tech or what?
