Remember last week’s book of the week, “face BOOK“? Well it inspired me to take photos at my mom’s 90th birthday with the plan to put together a birthday card in the form of a book very much like “face Book”. I set up a spot at the party to take photos of all the guests. I brought a notebook for the guest to write a short message with a marker. I’ve set up a template for the book and now I just need to drop the photos in place. It is going to be a wonderful memento of my mom’s 90th birthday party.
If you would like the InDesign template for a 7×7 blurb book you can download it from my dropbox for personal use. These are fully editable templates from InDesign CS6. You can change the colors and text as you would like.
I received a free 8×8 hardcover book coupon for Shutterfly recently and decided I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to try it out. I’ve never even been the Shutterfly site before so things were a bit rough to start. After a few false starts I figured out how to get a book started and upload photos for the book. Even though I choose their customized book path I found myself wanting more control over what I could do. But then I’m used to have complete control over my projects in Adobe InDesign. I spent 4 or 5 hours putting together a 20 page book. Having done it once it would probably take about half that time the second time around.
I was able to export it to a pdf but as you can see from above (and below) it has a watermark on each page. The link below will take you to Shutterfly’s preview of the book.
I can see how Shutterfly would be a good option for many people. They have lots of ways to share your photos and they are geared to really put together projects without too much thought on the customer’s part. I can’t see me ever using them as my primary source for books though. I’m too picky about wanting things the way I want them. I’m looking forward to getting the book and see what it looks like. I’ll post again after in comes.
I’m working on my calendar to give this Christmas. It is still in process but I’m getting close. I’ll post about it when I get it finished. I’ve done a calendar many times before and there are lots of ways to do them. Most local copy centers are set up to do a calendar. You supply the photos and they do the rest. There are tons of online sources for calendars too. Here are just a few.
I’ve always made my calendars myself, using Adobe InDesign, so I can’t recommend any of these options but I’m sure that they all make some great calendars. It is fun to add family birthdays and special events to your calendar. I’ve seen calendars where you put the photo of the person on the date too. You can use current family photos or historical photos. This can be a quick project by using one of the services available or a longer project if you do it yourself from scratch. The possibilities are endless but a family calendar is sure to be a big hit.
Last year I made one of Blurb.com‘s weekly planners for a friend. It turned out really nice with a photo for each month and the front and back covers. This year they have even more options and with their BookSmart tool it is an afternoon or evening project. There are other planners out there that you can customize with photos but in my searching I didn’t find one that will let you add important dates.
Of course you can design your own planner from top to bottom in Adobe InDesign but that isn’t an afternoon project and BookSmart gives a surprising amount of control. Which ever route you take I think it would be fun to put together a family planner with historic photos and important dates from the past. Click on the image below to a Blurberati Blog post about their weekly planner.
I thought I would make a template of this project available for you to download. I’m using Dropbox and I’m relatively new to it so I hope it works as desired. If you’ve not used an Adobe InDesign template before it is very easy. Just open the template as you would any document and then you can add pages and drag the desired master page for chapter headings and newspaper articles. You can customize it anyway you would like. If you want to edit the original template than you should make sure you open the original file. Think of the template as a starting place. This template is sized for a large landscape book on Blurb.com. To publish your finished book on blurb, download the pdf presets and export. Then upload the pdf to blurb and order you finished book. The cover template is for an image wrap book with 440 pages. So if your book is shorter you will need to make adjustments.
To download the files, click on the links below. One the page loads up it will look like gibberish, but don’t worry. Right click on the page and select “save page as” and save to your computer. Then you will be able to open the document in Adobe InDesign. (Sorry it has taken me all week to get this figured out)
This post concludes my Europe 1952 project. If you have questions that I haven’t covered let me know and I’ll do what I can to answer them, possible with an extra post. It has been a fun journey over the last few months.
One of the great things about doing this project was all the stuff that I had to work with. One of the challenging things about this project was all the stuff I had to work with. My mom is a saver and I think she saved everything she got on this trip. I have no idea how she got it all home. She didn’t have that much luggage. Even though sometimes it was a pain to figure out how to include most of the documents, brochures etc. that she saved, it adds to the flavor and the interest of the book. Some of the things I had to work with were:
I scanned these and cropped them to size before placing them in the document.
Postcards
Ticket Stubs
Some of the postcards and tickets stubs had interesting edges that I didn’t want to crop off. So after scanning I opened them in Adobe Photoshop, deleted the background so that it was transparent. Then when placed in the document the deckled or torn edges were preserved.
Booklets
Books
Medallions
Since these items were thicker I wanted to keep the dimension. So I also opened these images in Adobe Photoshop and deleted the background to make it transparent. I really like how you can tell they are books and not just a single sheet of paper. It was fun to have the medallion that my mom got from visiting the Pope. This same process works great for objects of any shape.
When placing the memorabilia on the page it is usually good to gather them near each other on the page and not spread them out across the page. Overlapping another piece of memorabilia or a photo can also help. The overlapping visually connects the items together and brings some order to a layout that might otherwise get too busy.
Among the many items that my mom saved from her trip to Europe in 1952 was a large map. I decided I wanted to use it at the beginning of each chapter. The map was challenging to scan because it was so big. So I scanned sections of it and then used Adobe Photoshop‘s photomerge to stitch together the section of the map for each country. If you’ve never used photomerge it is a very handy tool for doing things like panorama shots.
photomerged map
After I had a map section for each country I added a brown route line to mark the roads they traveled in that country. I did this also in Photoshop using the brush tool. To bring more focus to the country I added a grey mask that partially block out the neighboring countries, by adjusting the transparency of this layer.
map with route
map with surrounding countries grayed out
Once I brought the map image into Adobe InDesign, I added text boxes to label the cities they stayed in along with other relevant information and arrows to make it easier to tell the location of the city on the map. Arrows are easy to make in InDesign, just go to the stroke palette and select the style of arrow point you would like for the beginning or end of the line you made with the pen tool.
map with labels
I think the maps were effective in communicating a lot of the information at the beginning of each chapter in a visual way. How have you used maps in your projects?
In the early stages of putting together this book, I decided to break it up into chapters for each country. (Germany ended up with two chapters because they re-entered Germany a second time.) So I put together another master page in InDesign to make it easy to have a consistent look for the beginning of each chapter.
master page for Chapter headings
The beginning of each chapter was a natural place to put the itinerary for each country along with a map showing the route that they traveled. On the map I included the mail stops where they could pick up letters from family and friends back home. I also had information about the money of each country and the exchange rates in 1952. My mom’s passport had lots of entry and exit stamps from her trip so I added those to the beginning of the chapter. I’ll go over how I put the route on the map and how I handled the passport stamps in an upcoming post.
One of the wonderful resources I had for putting together this book for my mom was bunch of newspaper articles written by one of her fellow travelers on the trip. I wanted to include them because they had good information on what the trip was like, plus another perspective on Europe in 1952. But scanning in the articles and including them that way was problematic. First they were visually messy. They were different sizes and shapes and cut out from the paper in different way. Also some of them I just had a bad copy of the article and not the original. The next problem with going the scanned route was making them big enough on the page to be readable. After some thought I decided to try to replicated the look of the newspaper but to redo them so they fit into the book in a seamless way. The drawback was getting the text from the articles into my computer. I’ve never figured out how to do OCR so I had to type them in. It took awhile but I think it was worth it.
master page for newspaper articles
After I got the articles typed the next step was to create a master page for the newspaper articles. My basic master page has a dark brown background but that doesn’t look like a newspaper. So I changed the background to a nice cream color (I used the same color as the large text titles on each page). I changed the text to black and I went from three columns of text to five so that it would have the narrow column look of a newspaper. I added a header to duplicate the look of a newspaper and a large headline style for the title of each article.
Then we I came to the spot in the book where each newspaper article belonged it was a fairly simple task to change the master page and paste into the page the title and text. Then there were just a few little tweaks for the article and it was ready to go. I was very happy with the solution and I will keep it in mind for use in future projects.
When figuring out the way you want to layout the pages of a book I like to use a grid as the structure for the design. Before & After‘s has a two-part video that talks about using a grid in your design. If you want to learn more about grids in your designs it is well worth the 10 minutes or so it will take to watch them. I especially like part 2.
Because of the large size of the pages of this book (about 13″x11″) I wanted to have the text in columns. If a line of text gets too long in relation to the size of the letters it gets harder to read because it is so easy to lose your place on the line. Having columns of text solves this problem. I decided on three columns so I put guides on my master page for three columns. I also put guides horizontally to divide the page in three sections with in the margins. Instead of a small header or footer I chose to put a large title on each page. Part of the reason for this was that my mom, who the book is for, has macular degeneration plus cataracts so she couldn’t see well. Before I finished the project she had cataract surgery which helped her vision a lot. I thought that she would at least be able to read the title on each page and see something of the largest photos even if she couldn’t read all the text. It is important to keep in mind who you expect to read your stories and make decisions that will help them to be drawn into your book.
Basic Master page
If you haven’t used master pages you are missing a great time saver. In InDesign it is a simple as clicking on the master page in the pages pallet. By default there is a blank master page there called A-Master. Also by default this master page is applied to you whole document. When you add anything or edit anything on this page it is added to your entire document. Don’t worry, you can override this by dragging the [None] page in the pages pallet to any pages you don’t want to have the A-Master applied. I created two other master pages, one for the beginning of chapters and another for newspaper articles. I’ll talk about those in more detail in another post.
The advantage that having the three by three grid gave me was that it helped to make it simpler to figure out the layout for each page of the book. I had lots of photos and most of those photos are either one, two or three columns wide. Some are full bleed and a few go across to the facing page. But I still used those grid lines to help me to decide how large those photos were. Here are some examples pages.
The left hand page shows a “three column” photo and the right page is a full bleed.
This page has a bleed on three sides with a small “one column” photo overlapping on the left, while the right had page has two “two column” photos.
Here I have a “four column” full bleed and a couple of “one column” plus. When I was overlapping photos like here I was willing to allow photos to be wider than their column.
So how did I decide what size to make each photo? The first criteria was appeal of the image including the quality of the exposure. Because I wanted the photos to be the focus, if the image justified it I would make it as big as I could. Next I had to take into account how many photos or other memorabilia and the amount of text. Sometimes it is very tricky to get it to all coordinate together. But having the grid makes this easier and unifies the look of the book.
If you have any questions about how to do any of this please let me know. Next week I’ll cover how I handled the many newspaper articles I had for the book.
