photo book follow-up

MANY of you asked questions about the Encyclopedia of Me photo book gift I posted here. It made me all giddy again, because I love this gift!

So, here's how I did it.

- Emily Foley had written all of the posts on her blog over the course of two years. She finished in September of this year (2010). I knew she had labeled the posts under Encyclopedia of Me. So I went back to her blog, found the final post in September and clicked on the label at the bottom of the post. That brought up all posts from that series.

- I decided on an 8x8" finished book.  I used Adobe Photoshop and opened a blank 8x8" canvas.  Then I created a new layer and made a 1/2" border around the perimeter of the canvas.  This is so I would not make any designs elements too close to the edge and risk it being printed off page when the book was made.  This layer was deleted before saving the finished page.

- It took me an hour or two to decide exactly how I wanted each page to look.  I tried all different fonts and designs, but decided on this basic design.

- The I started the real busy work.  Since I wanted the block of pictures in the middle of the text, I copy and pasted the text from Emily's blog posts in two sections.  Top and bottom.  I added the top text, then the bottom then right clicked and saved the photo collage she had made with each post.  I put that photo in the center and then added my own rounded corner template (available for free here) to the photo collage to make the book feel a bit more soft.

- I used the eye dropper tool in Photoshop to draw a dominant color from the photo collage and made that the background for the color block at the page's top and the cursive title words.  I did the alphabet in order so I made sure two oranges weren't close together, etc.

When each page was finished I saved it into a special folder on my desktop and went on to the next.  A note: When Emily wrote her posts she made one for X,Y and Z so I made the page topper look like this...

I then added a title page.  For most of it, I took the explanation paragraph straight from her first Encyclopedia of Me blog post.  I added a small dedication from me, the gift giver, at the bottom.  You'll notice that this, the first impression of my labor of love, has the only type-o in the book.  BLAST!

Next came designing the covers.  Now that my pages were completely finished, I took the alphabet square from each page and arranged them onto a new 8x8" page in alphabetical order.  I slightly changed the order a bit of the way through, since the design was looking too repetitive.  This became the back cover.

 For the front cover I used the same image and added a rounded white square and used the same fonts from the inside to make a title for the cover.

That as pretty much the entire process.  I designed a spine, uploaded it all into Shutterfly, used a coupon code and sent this personalized gift straight to Emily for around $18.

FONTS USED
Title Letters: Candian (get it here)
Main Text: Print Clearly (get it here)
Cursive Text: Amelie  (get it here)