Road Rage Book - Google SketchUp Workshop: Modeling, Visualizing, and Illustrating - page 230

I suppose my primary reason for resurrecting this project in 2006 is that I had
endured 20 more years of frustrated driving and I finally “couldn't take it any-
more!” Whereas society and the media continued to vilify frustrated drivers, I,
on the other hand, empathized with them. Through my admittedly informal
market research, I found that virtually all good drivers became perturbed
on a regular basis. Furthermore, their frustrations were rarely self-induced;
instead such frustrations were invariably caused by the ridiculous antics
of clueless, careless, and reckless drivers. Road Rage was written to expose
idiot drivers, at the same time showing compassion for all the good people
affected by them.
Since this was a work of passion and not one for hire, its budget was strictly
self-imposed (although, as one might suspect, “approval” from my lovely wife
Amy was a prerequisite). To fund the purchase of an upgraded computer,
associated software, topic design and printing costs, website design and
hosting expenses, and miscellaneous supplies, I managed to keep spending
under my target of U.S. $25,000.
Other than myself, those who directly contributed to the project included
Michael Coogan (a marketing, branding, and positioning guru; cooganmf@
yahoo.com), Pete Stoppel (a SketchUp genius and forum moderator who
provided tips, guidance, and topic cover art; www.solosplace.com), and Cecile
Kaufman (my topic designer; www.x-heightstudio.com).
Project Context
Road Rage is essentially a cofee-table topic or a “bathroom reader,” with its
112 episodes drafted and laid out in Microsoft Word. Although it is perfectly
fine for a working draft, Word is not suitable for use in the publishing world;
so prior to project completion, the entire topic's content was transferred to
Adobe's In-Design CS3. The Word file had pages of size 7" × 9", which were
ultimately resized to 8" × 10" by my topic designer in order to create adequate
white space on each page.
And because I happen to be an expert user of Microsoft Excel, all the topic's
illustrations were mocked up inside spreadsheet tabs. This was done for
the sake of speed and ease of modification (plus the fact that I had not
yet learned to use Photoshop). As each SketchUp scene was created and
camera position finalized, a screenshot was taken, pasted into a blank
spreadsheet as an Enhanced Metafile, and then cropped to an appropriate
size and aspect ratio. Excel comes with a phenomenal array of “autoshapes,”
each of which can be modified easily and quickly. These autoshapes were
laid over screenshots to create arrows, lighting effects, exploded views,
callouts with text, fade outs, and so on (again, all of which were re-created
in Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and In-Design prior to submission to
the printer).