A workbook about publicly documenting projects while doing them

As I wrote in a previous post, I’m making a table display about my book group for a local educator’s conference. I’ve been using the Learn in Public workbook by Doug Neill to structure this project, including writing blog posts about my progress.

That first post included a plea for help and I learned something very valuable, indeed — ask for help! I got lots of great suggestions from people who have done similar projects in the past. Even better, some of my fellow book group members offered to help with the actual doing of the project.

I met with one of our group members, a marketing consultant, who also blogs about books as Tayé Foster Bradshaw. We worked out a board design, a color scheme, and all the various hand-outs and give-aways.

Last week, I purchased a cardboard trifold display board at Michael’s. With that, and this resource about how to do a table display using relatively inexpensive 11×17 prints, I was ready to mock-up my display using newsprint and a Sharpie.

CFUH Book Group table display mock-up.

The two side panels will have full-color book covers on four 11×17 sheets mounted length-wise. The middle panels will be three sideways 11×17 sheets. The top two can be printed black on white paper. The bottom one will have a photograph of our group, so it will need to be printed in color, too. I’ll use turquoise paper to make a color-popping edge at the top left of each sheet to help guide the reading.

Next step: set up all seven of those 11×17 panels as Power Point “slides” and take them to FedEx/Kinkos or the library to print. I expect that to come together fairly quickly now that I made most of the layout decisions while making this mock-up. The printing will have to wait until after our meeting on Thursday night when we’ll take the photo of our group.