Checklist before having your dissertation formatted
For most PhD students, this is the first time they’ve had a thesis laid out and printed. It’s probably the first time you’ve worked with a designer and a print shop, too. In this article, we’ll go through the most important things you can do before submitting your files to us. After all, good preparation is half the battle.
1. Start the design work in good time.
It is often thought that we can only start designing your thesis once your manuscript has been approved by the committee. That is not the case. Strangely enough, the only thing we do not need straight away is the content of your manuscript. Layout is about the presentation of the text and everything surrounding it; it has nothing to do with the actual content of the text.
We therefore recommend that you start working on the layout of your thesis as early as possible. Even before you have your final files, we can produce your cover and a complete layout proof. Once the committee has given its approval, all that remains for us to do is apply the agreed design to your files. Roughly speaking, this saves you 2–3 weeks in your schedule.
On our process page You can see that the first four steps can be carried out without final content. In most cases, of course, we do use something from the most recent files; this gives a good idea of what it will look like and makes the proofs much more realistic.
So when should you start formatting your thesis? We recommend that you contact us as soon as you send the manuscript to the examination board. Via our application page You can upload this draft file and we can then set the process in motion. Normally, a committee has around four weeks to give its approval. During that time, we can discuss and finalise all the design details so that we can get started quickly once approval has been granted.
2. Know what you want and what you like about other books.
The first question a thesis designer will ask you is: How would you like your manuscript to be laid out? Do you have any preferences or examples? What do you like? And so on.
A designer can approach their work in various ways; this generally ranges from instructions such as: “Just make it sleek and clean” to “I’d specifically like this typeface with this line spacing, and so on”. In both cases, it’s helpful to provide examples; these don’t have to be a thesis, but could also be a book or magazine whose layout appeals to you. Our designers can then work out how to translate this into your personalised design. On our examples page You can find inspiration; you can always take photos of theses or books and include them with your application.
3. Check the quality of your text and figures.
The most common criticism of submitted material relates to the quality of the figures. As part of our quality check, we automatically resize all images from your Word document to a realistic size to check what the effective resolution will be. We provide feedback on this, and in most cases there are a number of images or figures that are not of sufficient quality. In principle, this isn’t a problem for printing; it simply doesn’t look very good.
First of all, it’s a good idea to find the original files for your images. This is because when you insert an image into Word, it is compressed, which compromises the quality. These original images can have various file extensions (.jpg, .jpeg, .png, .eps, .ai, .pdf, etc.). We can handle almost all file formats. So gather the original files for all your figures, and there’s a good chance the quality will be just right straight away when you submit your files.
