Photo Book Challenge #1: Matching Your Photos to Book Size

Photo Book Challenge #1

In creating my Long Lost Photos of Southern Thailand photo book a few niggles came up.

Here’s the challenges that popped up:

— Finding strong (modern, contemporary) fonts to use (good solution here)
— Working out what size book is best for my images. Do you go landscape, vertical or 8 x 10 formats?
— How to make the cover design look great within the limits of the BookSmart template tool
— Making sure my resolution was at least 250PPI (180PPI wasn’t enough)

I was really happy with my photo book cover design concept (below)…

photo book challenge original concept

I like to get the cover right — it’s just a visual thing and it sets the feel for the rest of the book.

The challenge is that the cover photograph I chose is portrait format. And when you pop it into the BookSmart template for a 8x 10 book it loses (a lot of) the dynamics of the original shot.

Dynamics are important. This is the stuff that makes people pick up your book in a bookstore, or click on your book and purchase it…

Can you see what I mean?

photo book challenge trim lines

The pink area is the suggested ‘safe’ area for content. You have to keep important stuff away from the pink area. The red dotted lines show the parts of the page that may be trimmed away during printing.

And then there’s those little text guide boxes that don’t seem to allow me to expand and make my font larger (like the original concept).

Despite that, it still looks OK. I may have to rethink what book size to go with.

On the other hand, as this is an experiment for our photo book business then maybe I will just bite the bullet and go with it.

What do you think?

photo book challenge - rough cover concept

The cover preview (above) doesn’t grab me as much as my original idea.

But I’ll go work on it some more.

No one understands that you have given everything. You must give more.
— Antonio Porchia