craftgrrl | a photo book; prototype #001 (Reply)

(x-posted to

craftgrrl, and my journal)

I'm planning to "mass-produce" some photo books to put up for sale on my site. But before I even deal with the real things, I decided I should play around with prototypes to see where I make mistakes (because I do make mistakes, and quite often). Here are photos of the finished book, along with the little things I learned along the way.

Thanks to everyone in

handmadebooks who helped me out with the french fold, especially

fivestar who was kind enough to post photos for little slow me. :) I layed out how I wanted the pages to be printed -- total of 6 printed pages, not including the cover. I printed them on Epson Glossy Photo Paper on my Canon i320. The quality turned out pretty good. Then I cut the pages as perfectly as I could (so a few are off maybe by a millimeter, but it's not noticable) and folded them french fold, with the edges of the page being the spine.

Not quite a lesson, but: I may be cutting my pages with either my x-acto and ruler next time or at Kinko's with their precise paper-slicers.

The images on the two-page spread are to connect to make one photograph. I took all of these photos in late 2002 when I was in San Francisco with the family. I'm not sure yet which photos to put in the actual for-sale-books that I'll be making, although now that I'm looking at these again, I'm starting to re-like them.

I had a problem with printing text. All the images/text were layed out in Adobe Photoshop (6) and I printed from there. The text turned out a bit smudgy looking instead of sharp (however, my friend Quang sent me a copy of Adobe PageMaker (7) and he said it should do sharp text for me, so I need to play around with it). I used Georgia for the main font (on the page show above and on the cover), and as for the serial number, it's Arial. I smudged out my last name, but it's not like that on the print page.

Lesson learned: Do not put text directly along the edge of the page, because they end up being on the fold and looking cut off. dOH!

The cover! I wasn't sure what to put on it. A lot of people have their nice little design logo or something or other on the page, but my mind drew a blank, since I don't have a nice little design logo. Ha ha.. So I just used a circle in this yellow-green color that I'm growing fond of and put the number "1" in it, since it's prototype book #1. The second prototype book will have a #2 on it.. and the real books will start with the first book being "1", the second book being "2" and so on..

I used a light greenish cardstock for the spine and zig-zag folded it, then glued it onto the insides of the french-folded pages. Inspired by

antigirly :)

View from top of the book. Tiphanie Brooke must be some kind of perfectionist (or maybe she has perfectionist magic powers!) because my zig-zag fold turned out off quite a bit, so the view of the spine (from the top and bottom) looks kinda.. bleh. You can't really notice it in this picture, but some of the zig-zags were a little larger than others, and the spine actually sinks in a little bit, instead of standing straight. :(

View of the first two-page spread with the images connected. Turned out good! :)

And this is the view of the last two-page spread. You can see a thin green line going down the center, and that -- I do not like. It makes the image disconnected, so.. I either have to be a bit more careful/precise when doing this binding, or stick with something else.

The picture at the very beginning of this post shows the rest of the pages and how the book opens up, etc..

On the second prototype, I'm going to do a glue-binding sort of like perfect bind, and if that doesn't work then the third prototype will use a stab-binding. I need to find some cloth tape or something.. does anybody know where I can buy that? Would Michael's carry it? Hmm.. Thanks! :)