DTP: Book Layout Designer/Artist Needed for Scientific Publications

Job Description

We’re about to publish multiple scientific or fictional-emotional books in multiple editions with multiple columns and vivid colorful 2D/3D boxes, dynamic text flow around pictures, and GenAI pics to make reading a pleasing experience. The ideal candidate will have a strong background in designing layouts that incorporate these multiple columns and vivid, colorful 2D and 3D boxes. Your creative flair and technical skills will be essential in bringing our scientific content to life visually. If you have a portfolio showcasing similar work, we would love to see it!

Tasks:
1. Efficient template-based book layout with a given Word file, ideally in a classical layout/DTP (desktop publishing) tool.
2. Creating scientific and fictional-emotional layout template designs and discussing them with us.
3. Applying the designs to the books.

Requirements:
1. The final layout must be compatible with all common publishing platforms, or variants for them must be created efficiently: Amazon Kindle (KF8/AZW3), Apple Books , Kobo, Barnes & Noble NOOK, PDF (6″ x 9″ = 15.24 x 22.86 cm), EPUB, HTML/CHM with menu structure .
2. It must be cost-efficiently possible to release extended editions in 2-10 years, i.e., there should not be a dependency on expensive or then perhaps no longer existing online services like Canva, designrr.io, ingramspark.com, venngage.com, the AI e-book startups, etc. However, if they can export all data in a long-term editable format, that would be OK.
3. You should be available for multiple books and document your work so that we or another person could work with your data for a next edition in a few years.
4. Content must easily be exportable for web/social media marketing campaigns: text, HTML, and common graphics formats.
5. Colors must map regarding default color-to-BW conversions into distinguishable black & white (BW).

Your experience:
1. Experience with one or more DTP or magazine/book layout programs. Tell us which and how much experience.
2. Ability to work independently regarding layout decisions, how to distribute content into boxes, doing small additional research, or working with virtual assistants to get enough content to balance, e.g. examples, comments, quotes, pictures, tips, etc., regarding content and layout.
3. Experience with GenAI tools to generate pictures.
4. Experience with tools to create graphs and infographics.

Please tell us which tools you’d use and which relevant experience you have.

Possible layout tools:
1. Adobe InDesign
2. Adobe FrameMaker
3. Affinity Publisher
4. Atticus
5. Kindle Create
6. Calibre
7. QuarkXPress
8. Scribus
9. Maybe PostScript-level programming: Replacing the tables and other elements that Word generates on PostScript level with a better layout. There’s a risk this might not work well. Word probably uses many cryptic self-defined PS commands to do tables, but we could replace them to do nothing and then replace the first/last of them to do all layout in the new way and pass the coordinates of the tables as parameters, probably needing a small Python/Java/C++/PHP/VBA program to extract that coordinate data and create the new table layout call.
10. GenAI tools (Midjourney, DALL-E, Adobe FireFly -Adobe’s generative AI tool)
11. Graph/infographic tools (Adobe Illustrator, Graphviz)