Chris Yavelow – Designer

YAV Publications is an indie print-book, e-book, and magazine publisher, for which I work as a book-designer, editor, and owner/editorial director. My company now publishes books for nearly 90 authors, while also packaging books for other publishers and for authors who intend to self-publish. Packaging usually includes the editing, designing and typsetting the print book and e-book, and often the cover. I also edit books for other designers and design books that are pre-edited, but rarely create e-books without designing the accompanying print book.

I teach graphic design online for the Department of Graphic Communications at the University of Maryland Global Campus (UMGC), formerly known as University of Maryland University College (UMUC). I have taught a variety of courses all of which focus on Adobe software: InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, Premiere Pro, and After Effects.

Book Series editor for the award-winning Computer Music and Digital Audio Series, an imprint of AR Publications, in Wisconsin; coincidentally, the first company in the world to publish a volume of music completely typeset by computer.
Responsibilities included aquisitions, editing, contract development, and creation of occasional CD-ROMs for then-popular "Book/CD-ROM" combinations.

1991-1999: Creation of CD-ROMs for then-popular "Book/CD-ROM" combinations for such publishers as Verbum Magazine, Random House, Bantam, IDG. and several for AR Editions. For the latter, I was also the editor of the text portion of the Book/CD-ROM combos as part of my responsibilities as Series Editor for the CMDAS book series. My company also developed LEGO's first CD-ROM, an "Edutainment"; CD-ROM, which received a special Danish Design Prize for user interface.

2000-2005: Created FictionFixer, an unprecedented software tool for authors, now available at FictionFixer dot com. Technically an “expert system,” the software analyzes characteristics of current bestselling novels to define a model representing what the public expects from such bestsellers. Besides being a tool for authors and publishers, FictionFixer received much media attention when it was used forensically as an expert system to detect the authorship of several important documents pertaining to the 2008 presidential election. Additionally, in recent years, small portions of FictionFixer's unique feature set and approach to computational stylistics have been copied by many companies that provide online critique, editing, or grammar-checking for authors. As Oscar Willde stated, "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery..." (and a bit more, if one is familiar with the entire quotation).

Consulted for various Macintosh software companies on the development of software for typesetting music notation. For example, three years consulting for Coda Music on the development of Finale music notation software prior to its public release in 1989; consulting for Adobe Systems on the development of the font "Sonata" the first PostScript music font.

Associated activities included presenting lectures on typesetting music using computers (computer music notation or CMN) for the American Musicological Society National Conference (Massachusetts); the First International Workshop of Music Notation by Computer (Zurich); International Computer Music Association Conference-1986 (The Royal Conservatory, Den Haag, Netherlands); CMI: The Dutch Center for Computer Music (Den Haag, Holland), The Basel Musik Akademie (Basel, Switzerland); 5th International Conference: Audio Engineering Society: Music & Digital 1987] Technology (Los Angeles, CA); First Conference on Computers in Music Education University of Utah (including the keynote speech); Macworld Expo (San Francisco, CA), Apple Vivarium (Hollywood, CA); Seybold Desktop Publishing Exposition (Santa Clara, CA); The 85th Audio Engineering Society Convention (Los Angeles, CA); MacMusicFest 2.0 (Hollywood, CA); Computer-based Education & Composition Conference (Fullerton, CA); American Film Institute (Los Angeles, CA); January N.A.M.M. Show (Anaheim, CA); and quite a few other venues.

Numerous articles focusing on topics related to typesetting of music notation, as well as computer-automation for text processing.

Worked on Compugraphic Veritypers. This was pre-WYSIWYG, meaning this was before "What You See Is What You Get"; all input consisted of lines of alphanumeric characters from which one had to imagine the output, a task that was assisted by occasional test-print runs.
Typeset all the non-standard elements (tables, other informational graphics and any pages that broke the grid) for the English translation of the "Japanese Business Encyclopedia."
Typeset project proposals, including all proposals for artistic embellishment, for the expansion of the then-nascent Logan Airport in Boston.
Responsible for typesetting various books and print jobs for small book publishers in Boston, Cambridge, and surrounding areas in the eastern half of the state of Massachusetts.
Also typeset an endless stream of brass plaques for the Maimonides School and other Maimonides organizations.