How to Create a Photo Book Part2

As I have mentioned before I am creating a photo book for SoFoBoMo 09. This is the first photo book I have created so there has been a bit of a learning curve, and I still have a lot to learn. What I want to do in this post is explain how I put the layout together for the book.

When I worked for an advertising agency as a apple mac operator I used Quarkxpress extensively for layout work, but it comes with a hefty price tag and I can’t afford to use it. So for this project I used Adobe InDesign which I had never used before, but the basic principles of layout software are pretty much the same, so my Quark experience helped a lot.

Where to start with the layout for a Photo Book

It seemed a daunting task when I sat down at my computer with a blank screen in front of me, ready to start my photo book. And it was hard to know where to start. So below I’ve listed the steps that I worked out and went through to achieve a finished layout for my book!

• I started by getting all my images together that I wanted to use. I then put them into groups of similar themes e.g. veg, eggs, bread etc. So I could see exactly what I had to work with when it came to page layout, and weed out the ones I didn’t want to use.

• I’m a great fan of the use of good old fashioned pen and paper. And I used them to draw a storyboard of how I wanted the pages to look and where the  images were to be layed out on the pages, this also told me how many pages I would need.

• Next I went to Adobe Indesign and created the document for the photo book, setting the background colour and the number of pages. I then inserted the frames for the images into the positions I had on the storyboard. At this point I also inserted the text boxs where I wanted them.

• Then came the fun part of inserting the images into the frames and getting the first glimpse of how the book would look.

• This of course meant some fine tuning, as once I saw the images on the pages I wanted to move a few around, that obviously would look better in a different position, and get the look for the book that I wanted, and that I had in my mind.

All in all this process took about a week to complete from start to finish. Some of that time was taken finding my way around Adobe Indesign, and a fair bit more of that time was ‘fine tuning’. It can sometimes be hard to know when to stop…

Mandy