Sunday, September 25, 2016

I published my first miniature photo book

I can't believe it - I almost forgot to share this.

Two weeks ago I had my first miniature photo book published/printed. 
featuring Mother Goose nursery rhymes
I made this book using software that I purchased to do family photo albums: My Memories Suite 7. I used the free verison to test this software. But in order to order a photo album, you do have to purchase the software. I purchased this software after testing several other photo book making software that you use online. Some are of course better than others.I choose to purchase software as I didn't like the idea of being online the entire time I was designing. Today I have better internet speed and data amount available, but I would still prefer the offline option. I did ultimately need to upgrade my computer to handle the graphics but that became a problem only after upgrading to Windows 10. Read more about that here.

I decided to create a photo book for this project, not because of a story that goes with it. I do have other projects that do and I am thinking I might make a book for them in the future. Instead it was because the rhymes. I had done research on each rhyme and I wanted to share that. Well I also wanted to share the rhyme with the pics of the project.
To make this more than just a rhyme book, I also wanted to share how I did it. 
So I made it a flip book - making the back of the book look like a front as well.
How I made my Mother Goose nursery rhymes project
Here is a pic of inside the book
To keep the book unified I used the same background through the entire book.
I also did the front rhyme section all with the same fonts and font size. But I varied the font color with each rhyme.
This was my third digital photo book (second with the same software). The other two are 12x12 inch size. This is a 8x8 inch size. 
One issue I had was only seen once the book is printed. The text on some pages was too far into the center. If I was publishing this to sell, I would have to fix that. But I am not and won't be spending any more on it. It isn't bad, but a lesson learned for future in smaller books. The software does have guidelines for the edges to stay out of. This is in case they trim it too much in the process of finishing the book. You don't want text or a pic to get cut off. But the inside area issue has more to do with the fact this is a regular style of book instead of a lay flat.

The how to portion was to take all the blog posts I shared on how I made it and put them into the book. I had to do some re-writing so it was a cohesive book. 
The center of the book has a little game and also shows the top view and each side view. In hindsight I wish I had done a two page spread of the side views. That is mostly due to the 8x8 size.

I am overall very pleased with the book and hope one day to share the rhyme part with my grandkids or maybe a great niece or nephew.

1 comment:

burygardeners said...

I hope it is OK - I posted a link to this in my blog as I thought the end result was just lovely and am hoping to do something like it eventually (https://daltonhouse.blogspot.co.uk) Marilyn