All,

I've started a Twitter account with some UI examples and updates on future print runs and new editions. You can take a look at @slang.

Thanks!

If you didn't order multiple copies of Cadence & Slang, your order is shipped. This comprises the vast majority of you - all but six orders. Multiple copy orders will be shipped tomorrow morning.

If you live in the United States, your copy was shipped via Media Mail, so it should arrive within the next two weeks. If you live elsewhere, it was shipped via International First-Class, and delivery times vary from country to country - Canada addresses should take as long as the US, for example, but the lone Estonian backer should expect to wait a little longer.

If you pledged $40 or more, and you don't receive your copy of Cadence & Slang within the next three weeks, send me an email at nickd at nickd dot org.

And don't forget: the Cadence & Slang release party is at New Wave Coffee, Logan/Milwaukee, this coming Thursday from 6p-10p. Even if you're getting yours via mail, I'd love to see you in person!

The home stretch:

I spent the past five days cleaning up addresses, printing postage, putting together the super secret vault for the other 700 copies, and getting ready for a few friends to come over and pack envelopes.

On Sunday, we set to work.

The end result, stacked pretty high:

After the packing was all done, we killed off a keg of Kostritzer and celebrated at a brewpub around the corner. Thanks to everyone who came out.

This morning, I woke up at 6am, filled a friend's car with all the books, and we set off for the post office.

And behind the post office, I said goodbye to two years of work:

Now, three hours later, I'm sitting here nursing a very large cup of coffee - bleary and tired from everything I did between receiving the books last Tuesday and now. I'm heinously ill-equipped to wax eloquent about the whole process at the moment, so I'll repeat what I said a year ago: thanks for believing in this, and for helping me see this through. I hope you like the end result, and find it worth the wait.

Printing. All done, and I received two advance copies of Cadence & Slang today. They look awesome. After so many months of fretting about the final product, it looks like things have finally paid off. I'll be mailing one of the copies to the Library of Congress tomorrow. Here's what they look like:

Wait, no.

Shipping. On October 08, I paid the printer in full, and they shipped three hundred copies to my apartment. They should arrive by Wednesday the 13th at the latest. The other 700 are being sent to my super fancy climate-controlled dog-patrolled underground holding vault, also known as the basement of my parents' house an hour's train ride away. As I sell more copies, I'm going to head out there, pick up a crate of books, come back, and pack and ship them.

Once the book arrives, I'll spend the rest of the week stuffing envelopes and getting packages all set. The ship date will probably be sometime between October 16 and 25. Regardless, I'll notify you when your copy has been shipped. Orders from the United States should go out shortly before international orders - but not by more than a day or two. I'll be updating my Twitter with more details as needed.

Release party. If you live in Chicago, I'm going to be at New Wave Coffee (the southeast corner of Logan/Milwaukee) on Thursday, October 21 from 6p to 10p for a little release party. I'll have copies of Cadence & Slang on hand, and you can come with a credit card - I take them with Square, an app that fits Cadence's principles rather wonderfully. If you don't live in Chicago, tell your Chicagoan friends to come out and support.

One more thing. You've probably already ordered your copy if you're reading this, but it bears repeating that the rest are on sale at the book's official site, and they'll ship in the same way as those betrothed to Kickstarter backers. If you like the book, do tell your friends and colleagues about it; word of mouth is all we have as promotions go.

How's your fall been? Good?

It has been forty days since I last spoke here. It's time for another update. It's been a while, and a ton of stuff has happened.

Namely, the manuscript is done.

Hold your applause: the book is not done. I'll believe that once it's printed, in my hands, and then shipped to your hands. And for that to happen, it has to get printed. So that's what I'm doing. I signed a contract with the printer yesterday, and will send them my files tomorrow, and payment in three days.

(Why three days? The CD that I mentioned way back when, with your money in it, matured yesterday - and the money is on my way back to my regular bank. That's how long it takes for the fancy computers to do their thing.)

Once that happens, I receive a proof copy: one single book that will look like what gets printed. I'm going to make corrections to the proof, send them back, and then receive a corrected proof. Repeat until I decide to print the book - probably two rounds of this. Then a month lapses for them to print the book, and then I ship everything out. We're still on track for your receiving your copies by the end of 2010, but those are the gory details.

I am printing 1,000 copies. Around 250 preorders (including yours) are spoken for, and I hope to give around 60 free copies to my editors and those whose works I cited. That leaves around 690 copies that I hope to sell in the coming months after Cadence & Slang's release. As early supporters of my work, you're the best hope that I have to publicize this. I hope you like the book, and tell your friends and colleagues about it.

The final quote that I approved ended up being slightly below what I predicted. But I promised to devote every cent of your money to the project, so I'm plotting a surprise, which I will not tell you about yet.

So yesterday, I celebrated the only way I know how: by ordering a thousand padded envelopes and labels, and receiving a classy gift for my efforts. It just shipped an hour ago... with six tracking numbers. I am looking into storage space for all this. I am also contemplating what to do with the hat. Suggestions are welcome.

Obviously, the illustrations are also finished, and I've contacted the five backers who purchased originals for their shipping information. If you asked for a drawing, I'll be sending them out on Saturday.

Finally, how to (hopefully) handle 750 more orders. I received a Square yesterday. If you live in Chicago (or know folks who do), and you want to buy another copy of the book, track me down sometime. I'm also looking into a better ordering system than my preorder page's PayPal button.

Backer updates will be coming a little more frequently, now that so much is happening with the book, so stay tuned!

I haven't written here in a while, and there is a reason for that: Cadence & Slang is almost ready to print. I have spent the past several months keeping my head down and working on it as much as time allows.

The manuscript is entirely finished, but it is not done with being edited, and the illustrations are still forthcoming. Because you're morbidly curious, here is how the book is being written and edited:

1. 
   
2. I write a chapter.
3. 
   
4. I go through two passes of editing by myself.
5. 
   
6. My loving grammar nazi girlfriend rips it apart.
7. 
   
8. I send it to some really smart friends. They rip it apart, and send back feedback.
9. 
   
10. I type the feedback up and make sure everything looks consistent and nice.
11. 
    
12. One more edit pass on my part.
13. 
    

As publishing goes, this is pretty unorthodox. My colleagues' edits basically function as suggestions. As it's gone so far, I incorporate about 80% of my edits unchanged, tweak another 15%, and discard the last 5%. Ultimately this process eliminates the chance of fighting with people that may not have the same ideas as I do for how the book will turn out, and it brings more of the "self-" to "self-publishing." Hopefully it won't turn out like crap, because then everybody wins.

So here's where we are: five of the seven chapters are up to #5. The other two are up to #3, but they are the shortest chapters, and they'll likely hit #5 by this Friday. I'm going to work on #6 all this week; I'm spending the next nine days working exclusively on the book. I hope to send it off to the printer by Labor Day, but that may slip by a couple of weeks. All of this means we're still on track to have it finished and ready by the end of 2010.

The idea of saying "it'll be out in three months" rather than "it'll be out at the end of 2010" is freaking me out a little, and the idea of saying "I'm almost done with Cadence & Slang" is freaking me out a lot. I've worked on this, exclusively and nonstop, for almost two years, and I have no idea what I'll be doing afterward. (Well, other than celebrating.) There's a certain imminence to it that I don't quite know how to reconcile with the fact that I still have to work on it. I'm pretty sure the finished product is going to be ridiculously cathartic.

Once it's out, I want to have a release party for Cadence & Slang somewhere in Chicago, which means you should keep the entire months of November and December open until further notice. Thanks.

Finally, some random administrivia:

• 
  
• I'm going to be in San Francisco over Labor Day weekend. I hear there are, like, five or six tech companies there, so maybe a backer lives in the area. Maybe. Want to meet up? Let me know.
• 
  
• I'm going to be in DC on October 07 and 08. You can meet me anywhere you'd like, as long as it's Churchkey.
• 
  
• If you're interested in starting a Kickstarter project yourself, or if you're curious about how the process went for another self-publisher, fellow Kickstarterer Craig Mod has written a pretty fantastic post about the process. Makes for nice bedtime reading.
• 
  

SXSW was awesome. I met about thirty backers, a couple of project creators, and several administrators of Kickstarter itself. I crashed with one backer who was generous enough to offer her room, and received the best business card of the entire conference from another, who walked around taking Polaroids:

Thanks to everyone who tracked me down over the course of SXSW. I know I promised handshakes in my backer gifts, but I'm pretty sure I gave more hugs than handshakes. To which I say:

It was my first-ever SXSW, and I heard quite a few folks talk about how large it had become. Some groused about how different it was back in the day. Obviously I have no perspective, but I had a total blast, and am kicking myself that I didn't attend in previous years. It's amazing how approachable and affable everybody is, and how willing they are to extend their time to hang out with relative strangers. The developer of my favorite-ever iPhone app invited me to have a beer within five minutes of chat. The writer of my favorite-ever link blog invited me to dinner unprompted.

Maybe I'll meet more of you in 2011.

I also printed fifty more copies of Cadence & Slang Mini, and handed out every single one, along with a ton of stickers. If you (backer or no) received a copy, you can post photos of stickers or Mini at the new Cadence & Slang Flickr group.

Oh, and I'm about a month away from finishing writing.

Hello! It's been almost a month since I last wrote here. Thanks to everyone who emailed about Illustrator; I think I have a solution worked out. Two other things are noteworthy:

1. I've worked on Cadence & Slang exclusively for the past three weeks. Surprise! My freelance contract expired recently, and I have a month between it and my next gig, after SXSW. I have enough cash saved up that I can go jobless for a month and work daily on the book – so I have, spending about eight hours a day on it. I feel really happy with where I currently am on it. In a couple of weeks I'll be giving a manuscript to my friend Daniel Bogan, so he can draw some nice illustrations.

2. I'm going to SXSW Interactive on Thursday. Thanks to the generosity of a backer, I have a place to crash a few blocks from the convention center. If you find yourself in Austin a little early, I'll be grabbing a beer or three with whomever wants to show up at the Ginger Man, at 301 Lavaca, on March 11 at 8PM. It's apparently the best place in Austin for craft beer – and with this tap list, I'd be astonished if anything tops it. We can talk about beer and usability.

If you can't make the Ginger Man or hate deliciousness, I'll be roaming Austin all weekend, of course. If you helped make this book a reality I'd love to meet you. Shoot me an @-reply on Twitter and I'll try my best. Or here's the list of panels that I'll be attending – subject to change, naturally, but I'll try to keep this up to date. (I've found that site, sitby.us, really useful, so you should head over there and add your own picks!)

You should have stickers and/or Cadence & Slang Mini by now. If you don't, email me at nickd at nickd dot org. So far only one person has expressed shipping issues, which is a pretty amazing proportion. Fingers crossed that it stays that way when I mail books.

Writing is now done for every section. In nerd terms, this means the book is feature complete, but not bug-fixed. I have the next several months to clean up the writing, fire drafts off to friends, finesse the whole thing, work with my illustrator to develop pretty doodles, and make some doodles of my own.

On the last point: it's easy to spend 37,000 words discussing interaction design (and yes, that's where we're at right now), but it's much easier to express those ideas pictorially. I'm ahead of time a little, and want to find novel ways to deal with this. It makes more sense, especially given how I've laid out the book, to establish its own internal visual grammar. Every operating system has its own way to visually express a form pull-down, for instance, and countless more ways exist to wireframe it. At the same time, the instant you use any elements from any real-world operating system, the book dates itself. But I want to express these conventions, and familiarity is on my side: after 20 years of stagnant GUI design, everyone on Earth knows what a checkbox is.

Other books have been successful with this. For example, the influential books of Edward Tufte have dozens of graphs that are near-uniformly set in Gill Sans, with the same color palette. And while I have no interest in comparing C&S to Visual Display, the concept makes sense, especially considering both books concern themselves with cleaning up current work to some degree.

So I'm thinking of trying my hand at Adobe Illustrator over the coming weeks, and seeing what happens. I can already sketch well, and wireframing looks decent, but we'll see how well I work with vector graphics for the first time. I'm super adept at Photoshop, but Illustrator... not so much. This is all a long way of saying: if you have any decent tips or resources for learning Illustrator fast and correctly (I'm acutely sensitive to there being a right way and a dumb way in Adobe products), dump them in the comments.

I'm going to SXSW Interactive, and need a place to crash. I'm weighing my options, but if you have a decent place near downtown or want to split a hotel room, let me know.