AHLP’s Graphic Design

Our excellent graphic design results from a business-to-business partnership. A key member of the executive staff of Africana Homestead Legacy Publishers, and a contractor, Omega Group Concepts III, jointly comprise AHLP's Graphic Design section within the Art and Photography Department. AHLP's executive staff has ten years of experience in graphic design and print production. A professional design group, the partners of the Omega Group Concepts III have over 40 years of combined experience in project management, design, and production in the graphic design and printing industries.

AHLP design team

Our team members are Brian Lancaster, principal graphic designer and member of Omega, Lionel Archer and Ronald Moore of Omega, and Carolyn C. Williams of AHLP (under her design hat). Although team members are able to work both on MAC and PC, Brian favors the MAC for his design work, while Lionel, Ron, and Carolyn work primarily on PC. Brian established the high standards for Africana Homestead Legacy Publishers' graphic design, in his rendering of the company logo and the dust jackets and book covers for the first three publication projects.

AHLP design software

AHLP designers use commercial design software made by several companies. Each designer has his or her favorites among the options. This list includes several well-known individual programs that AHLP uses to create book covers and illustrations:

• Adobe InDesign
• Adobe Photoshop
• Adobe Illustrator
• Adobe Creative Suite for design and publishing
• Quark Xpress
• CorelDraw
• will adopt graphing and mapping software for use by Dec 2006

Carolyn C. Williams developed and implemented AHLP’s typography for its books and serial publications. The design team lays out all publications and marketing materials in these commercial programs:

• Adobe PageMaker
• Adobe FrameMaker
• Quark Xpress (occasional use)
• Adobe Acrobat Professional

AHLP designers use commercial font packages from the Adobe and Bitstream companies. Since these are most compatible with out pre-press and manufacturing systems, we use Type 1 postscript fonts for the bulk of our work. Most nonfiction is typeset in Adobe Garamond. In 2006 and 2007 we will add other font families for nonfiction publications. For fiction, creative nonfiction, and public relations, marketing, and advertising pieces, AHLP uses other font families according to the nature of the project.

Occasionally AHLP designers use True Type or Open Type fonts, such as those included in Microsoft or other word processing programs, or as freeware or shareware from the Internet. When working with this category of fonts, we always render (change) the type as artwork (by changing into outlines) so it does not generate fail a flight check inspection or generate errors during printing.

AHLP's basic typography guidelines restrict us to using non-serif fonts for titles, headlines, display type, or in technical works, such as graphs and tables. We use serif fonts for body text, unless we need a special look due to other factors, such as illustrations. Adhering to good design practices, we prefer using no more than two font families per project.

In fall of 2006, AHLP will expand into typesetting African languages in two novels. For one project in particular, we are testing the use of unicode fonts to integrate them into our publishing system. Unicode is essential since the universal African alphabet adopted for typesetting African languages has 57 letters (Anglophone) or 56 letters (Francophone).

AHLP page website design

Carolyn C. Williams developed and implemented AHLP’s website design, using management and site design tools in the service package purchased from ApolloHosting.com, a web hosting vendor. In 2006 and 2007 two additional staff will maintain and develop the website under her direction.

In late spring 2006, AHLP’s redesign of its website started. A key goal was to override erroneous default settings and standardize all type to non-serif fonts, the correct typographical style for online viewing. We set the options so the browser looks for Verdana, Arial, or Helvetica, fonts available on the PC and MAC. AHLP's web designer feels confident the other new features will give visitors a better experience:

• more effective navigation tools
• printer-friendly documents (set with serif fonts for better reading on paper)
• excerpts of work with security features to protect copyright – online viewing only and no copying of text
• rich simple syndication (RSS) feed of press releases and other news for media

Successful Design in Publishing

From the start of AHLP's entry into publishing, compliments on our book covers and illustrations have been numerous from all quarters, authors, reviewers, and readers. Africana Homestead Legacy Publishers has a design team that is always poised to produce outstanding work.

For information on AHLP's graphic design, send an e-mail to this address:
artdepartment@ahlpub.com

To contact the Omega Group Concepts III, send your e-mail to this address:
omegagroupconceptsiii@ahlpub.com