Rick Smolan:
“The Obama Time Capsule”

One year after the election of President Obama, as his initiatives for change collide with stubborn political realities, it gets harder by the day to recall the sunnier political realities they displaced: the soaring rhetoric of the campaign; the pomp and lift of Inauguration; even the headlong rush for results that marked his first hundred days in office.

An easy way back, if you’re so inclined, runs through “The Obama Time Capsule,” a 200-page, large-format hardcover book that covers a two-year span from early days in the campaign to Day 100 in the Oval Office. The story is told chiefly through rare, striking photos from more than 140 veteran campaign photographers, which are framed by informative captions, meaningful quotations, and insightful essays by writers like Joe Klein, Arianna Huffington, and Colin Powell.

A standout feature of this retelling of Obama’s story is the degree to which it lets readers make it theirs. After ordering the book (exclusively online through Amazon), readers get a one-off custom copy that features several satisfying personalized inclusions: of their names (as co-author on front cover and title page and in a facsimile inauguration invitation); of their own written book dedication; and of their family photos (in an inside gallery of notable Obama supporters and on a back-cover campaign button graphic).

“There are many great books about President Obama's journey to the White House, but what sets ours apart is that it enables readers to weave their own names, photographs, and stories into the President's story,” says Rick Smolan, co-author with Jennifer Erwitt, and president and founder of Against All Odds Productions in Sausalito, CA. “A lot of my friends feel that if not for them Obama wouldn’t have made it to the White House. They took the time off from work, held fund-raising parties, called their mothers in Florida. So why not reflect that in
a book?”

If unique inclusions set the book apart, what makes it very much like every other coffee table book published by Smolan over nearly three decades is the strict exclusivity of its design and production workflow. “Every component of this project, from photo editing (Aperture) to design (Adobe CS4) to video (Final Cut Pro) was created entirely on a Mac,” says Smolan.

Picture This

Appropriately, Smolan found his inspiration for the book in the aggregate click of a dozen iPhone cameras: “On election night at the moment Obama won, several of my friends — these were not photographers — pulled out their iPhones and started taking pictures of the TV set. They spontaneously felt that this was a moment they’d want to remember the rest of their lives: exactly where they were, who they were with, what they were doing.”

For a veteran publisher, it was an easy jump from living room epiphany to the decision to do a book. Smolan’s “Day in the Life” book series, featuring best-selling photo books that captured life in America, Australia, and the Soviet Union, was an 80s publishing phenomenon. In the 90s, he explored digital storytelling in interactive CD-ROMs (“From Alice to Ocean,” “Passage to Vietnam”). “I came to love the idea of using technology to do better storytelling, of doing things so differently that it makes people completely reconsider the subject,” he says.

Personal Effects

Doing the Obama book differently meant adopting and extending recent experiments he’d made in book personalization. “We’ve been doing books where readers can upload a photograph to our website and have that image of their wife, kids, or wedding featured on the cover,” says Smolan. “We thought that if we applied this same idea to a book about Obama’s journey to the White House it would become a uniquely personal piece of history.

Although Smolan’s primary intent in enabling personalization was to create a better experience for his readers, he sees it also solving a chronic publishing problem. “Today, 60 percent of published books come back to warehouses and get destroyed,” he says. “But with this book there are no copies in stores, no bookshelves, no review copies. Each copy is created as you order it, so it doesn’t exist until you bought it. Economically, environmentally, it’s just so much better.”

Designs on Mac

Although the personalization angle made for great high-concept pitching to potential book sponsors, it created sticky marketing and design issues. “I was worried that people might associate print-on-demand with vanity press books,” says Smolan. “We made sure that this book had the same fine printing, photography, writing, and design elegance as any art book you would buy in a high-quality book store.”

Charged with delivering that elegance was Creative Director Michael Rylander. “My design goal was to present the Obama story in a fresh way while allowing users to weave their own narrative,” he says. “The main challenge was to find natural, engaging ways for users to add their own content without becoming kitschy.”

Rylander also designed the online buying experience, providing clear explanations for uploading photos, entering text, and previewing. “Because many buyers were not tech savvy, the UI had to be ultra-simple, masking the complex technology behind the process,” he says.

As always, Rylander’s search for elegant user solutions began with his Mac. “As a lifelong supporter of all things pure and simple, I have no other choice than to use a Mac,” he says. “Every square nanometer is engineered to make it simple to create: be it music, graphics, motion, or stuff we haven't even dreamed up yet. That frees me to explore ideas quickly and then refine until they sparkle. The fact that the machine designs themselves are museum-worthy is icing on the cake.”

Rush to Publish

Weaving a spring-tight narrative of pictures and words was made that much more challenging by the team’s self-set publishing deadline. “We gave ourselves 100 days to get it done, starting on Inauguration Day,” says Smolan. “Obama had his agenda; we had ours.”

Feeling the pinch of that deadline, Rylander nevertheless turned the book out quickly, using Adobe Creative Suite for Mac to create custom scripts (InDesign), to proof pages (Acrobat), and to fine tune layout (Photoshop). “My go-to design tools are Adobe CS4, specifically Photoshop and Illustrator,” says Rylander. “To pull this off, all the apps had to work in concert, and they performed as advertised.”