Publishing has been the main stay of tjgraphics for over 15 years, we have worked with most UK book publishers and many foreign ones. You will find our name in the front of 100s of titles on subjects as diverse as the menopause and card games, we've desgned and set books on just about every subject and for every age group in between.

Whenever you tell someone that you're a book designer the reply is always the same, 'Oh, you design the covers?' This never fails to raises a smile, as no-one ever considers that the body of a book has to be designed. However having said that we have always considered that good book design should go unnoticed, it's only bad design that makes using a book an unpleasurable experience. We have stuck by this ethos in all the titles we have produced.

tjgraphics was started in a time before the Mac, in the heady days before DTP. We experienced the art, and it was an art, of paste up, blue line boards and editorial marks. In some ways it is sad that those days have gone, however had the Mac not revolutionised publishing then DTP skills wouldn't be so easily accessible and affordable. We consider that our time at the drawing board rather than the keyboard has given us an excellent grounding in book desgn without some of the constraints imposed by the computer, by that we mean that when we moved over to the Mac we made it do what we knew we could with traditional methods rather than being happy to accept what was easy to produce using computer. Anyone who's old enough to have been working in the early '90s will remember the period of square box design and bastardised typefaces.

We set our first book on a Mac in 1989 quickly realising that this was the future, we embrased the concept of DTP with a passion, a passion that continues to this day, the box under the desk may be a different colour and considerably more powerful but it's still down to the operator to get the best out of it, somthing we feel confident in saying that tjgraphics have been doing for 18 years and will continue to do for the forseeable future.

We have continued to expand our knowledge of the Mac and recent years have moved over to a full digital workflow. tjgraphics was key in instigating the digital workflow used by the UKs largest publisher, DK, to produce their first all digital book, and quite a book it was too. It was decided that The 2003 Judith Miller Antiques Price Guide was to be created entirely digitally from digital photography right through to hi-res PDFs for output. With over 8,000 images and more than 750 pages it really was in at the deep end. We had been working digitally for a couple of years on and off, but there were still the odd image that would go off for scanning or one or two publishers who refused to accept that you could print from hi-res PDFs.

That was back in 2002 and we're pleased to say the book has been a great success prooving that digital workflow can make a huge saving on your production costs. Now in it's 5th year we are currently setting the 2008 edition, bringing the total number of pages set to over 4,500 and that's just the Antiques Price Guide, we had used the same workflow with the annual Collectors Price Guide, that has also been running since 2003 with over 4,000 pages produced to date. The image and archive for these titles now occupy nearly 1Tb of disk space, but as storage becomes cheaper and more stable this is managable in a small office environment, with the added benefit of being instantly accessible at any time, whereas in the past data of this volume would have required archiving. We run a daughter and grandaughter backup so data recovery in the event of a crash is just a few keystrokes away with minimal downtime, vital for us and equally the client.

When the digital workflow for this project was initally outlined it was decided that to aid co-edition publications we would produce a 'colour' PDF and a 'text black' file, this has served us well as pages from the UK edition have been published in Australia, Germany, France, US and most recently China. Reusing the 'colour' PDF has kept cost to an absolute minimum. A job well done, whichever way you look at it, and one we at tjgraphics are very proud of.

So, now you can see that we are not a flash in the pan, and have a good working knowledge of the industry. We welcome all types of project from private press to major publishers. We have the ability to adapt to your needs from a full packaging service to simply designing and setting. Please do consider us for your next project, our prices are highly competive and normally based around negotiation with the client so as to fit in with their budgetary requirements, we have found, over the years, that that keeps everyone happy.

If you have any questions or would like more information please do contact us.