It must be easy, its just a PDF - Forked Thread from What's new with the GSL?

[Erik Mona]

But once you do see it it's kind of difficult to pull your eyes away.

YMMV.

--Erik

 

[Nellisir]

If Eric Mona is reading, I want to ask if Dungeon or Dragon "weren't particularly difficult to implement"? I would ask him if he had any long days, long nights or stressful deadlines that kept him up at night.

I won't even try and speak for Erik (particularly since he's already done so), but the Oerth Journal alone gave me a few stressful deadlines and long nights...and I didn't even have "official" deadlines, a budget, or...pretty much anything. I do remember a big debate about whether or not to start offering issues in this newfangled "pdf" format, in addition to our standard txt, rtf, and html versions.

 

[Nellisir]

If you tried real hard to see it as that, yes. It was an eye, people, an eye. Like Sauron's eye in the movies.

Edit: Or were people referring to the red energy around the sword? Yeesh. You really need to be looking for that to see it.

I think it's energy + sword. I dunno. All I can think is that some people are sleeping with the wrong sort of people.

Or Energy - sword, actually. I had to lean back and squint alot.

 

[Scott_Rouse]

But once you do see it it's kind of difficult to pull your eyes away.

YMMV.

--Erik

Man's ruin \/

 

[catsclaw227]

Man's ruin /

I gotta admit, you got the image swapped out pretty quickly. But, because of the interwebs, the original will live in infamy.

Now that you can look back and laugh (or not), how did that go with the bosses at corporate?

 

[Scott_Rouse]

I gotta admit, you got the image swapped out pretty quickly. But, because of the interwebs, the original will live in infamy.

Now that you can look back and laugh (or not), how did that go with the bosses at corporate?

They likely never saw it but if they did it was really no big thing compared to their own ooops moments.

 

[Erik Mona]

Man's ruin /

Hilarious.

 

[Erik Mona]

The point I was trying to make in bringing up that example is not to say "ha, ha, ha, look at that dumb mistake," but rather to compare the digital and print mediums.

Dumb mistakes happen in publishing all of the time. I remember a Dragon cover that went out with the word Angels spelled as Angles. Dungeon once went out with Eberron misspelled on the cover, something that slipped past the art director, me (the editor), two assistant editors, and the entire approval team at Wizards of the Coast. I find typos and more serious errors in professional publications all of the time.

The difference in print is that you're stuck with it, and you can never fix it. It's done. Online, you can go in and fix what needs to be fixed. Instead of people getting bent out of shape about it, they'll probably thank you for improving their product.

--Erik

 

[Pseudopsyche]

If you tried real hard to see it as that, yes. It was an eye, people, an eye. Like Sauron's eye in the movies.

Heh. I tried giving the same explanation to my fiancée re the cover of the 3.5 MM. In the end, it was easier to switch editions than put up with the mockery.

 

[kenmarable]

It was poorly planned from the beginning, or planned by someone who had no idea what they were trying to do and padded a resume with things that they didn't understand to begin with making promises of things that could be done with no reasonable understanding of what it takes and timeframes of getting things done and publishing.

Considering this isn't hypothetical, but an actual person is behind these things, accusing that person of padding their resume is just a wee bit rude, but maybe that's just how my Mom raised me.

Plus there's the fact that (at least last I heard, in all fairness I haven't been reading it lately) Chris Young was in charge of Dragon and Dungeon online, and having done a tour of duty at WotC and then Paizo on the magazines before going back to WotC for a few years, I'd say he wasn't padding his resume and does have a clue what he is doing.

However, your entire argument is based on the premise of "you should be doing everything months early, so nothing can be a problem at all." Well, that's all well and good in theory, but theory meeting the real world isn't always that easy.

A) We're only human. I should have started saving for my retirement when I got my first part time job on high school, and I should brush AND floss after every meal, and a whole lot of other I shoulda's that just ain't true.

B) Probably more of an impact in the case of Dragon and Dungeon is that it is in addition to everything else that WotC is doing. In your explanation, it's easy for an editor to tell one of the people in Design "Hey get me that druid playtest article by such and such date." However, that designer is also working on other projects, and WotC has even stated (or at least did back when I was reading eDragon) that if a Designer has to decide between working on a print book or an article for DDI, sorry, but DDI can wait. So an editor can happily assign articles all he wants, but if the resources to get them done aren't there, it doesn't matter at all how far in advance he assigns them.

C) Freelancers flake out. Unfortunately, I know I've been responsible for that as a freelancer (sometimes with good reason - wife's cancer during Oathbound; sometimes without good reason). An in house person is easier to hold accountable and keep them on task, but as with B, they often have a dozen other things and not enough time to do them all. Freelancers, on the other hand, can be just as unreliable but for less obvious reasons. You say "if they miss X deadlines, they never work for you again", and that's really easy to say. But realize that every value of 1 to X, means your schedule slips. Sure, most magazines start working very far in advance, but slippage will eventually get you to tight deadlines no matter how hard you try.

Oh, and advice like this:

You can commission two peices of work, one from different artists if frelance, or inhouse have difference artists work on the same thing, and the unsed can be trashed or saved for later in an archive of unused artwork. This reduces stres for not having anything even when you would have prefer the one that wasn't quite finished, but didn't want to rush and end up with faulty art like Erik described having a fighter wielding a vagina.

isn't all that helpful. Sure, doubling the art budget can help you meet deadlines and handle problem art, but try selling that idea up the chain of command. Sure you can say that some can be used for later projects, but that's still cost today for something later (very hard sell), and also pushes for more generic artwork that is easier to re-use rather than artwork more directly tied to the article.

I have only freelanced with magazines, but from that little experience as well as just listening to those who are in the trenches every day talk about the experience, I'd say that your ideas are great in theory and of course every publisher should aim towards them, but in reality, things are usually far more complicated and difficult and your ideas are best as a goal than expected practice.