The family annuals

A job I finally did while we waited for Edith to arrive – a time when I had a couple of spare days on my hands – the two blurb books I’ve had sitting in the to-be-done pile – one for over a year now – our family annuals.

We chose landscape softcover with premium paper – and for those of you in the UK keen to avoid any postal taxes they’re shipped from the Netherlands, so you’re safe! Each is 120 pages and we thought pretty good at £17.95 each. What we think of that when we’re back in NZ remains to be seen.

These shall most certainly be an annual event – so much fun to put together – and really tremendous books.

from the 2007 book :

from the 2008 book :

A friend sent me an email asking whether I had any design tips for making a blurb book to which I replied, well of course I do :)

I like to keep things consistent and simple. I made most spreads one full image on the right and one large image with white space on the left. Some I did use more photos, but I made sure to use only simple layouts – no fancy collage stuff or lots of different sized images – things like three by three small boxes and also pages with two images the same size were good. Nice even stuff. No mess.

There’s no text apart from an introduction / overview of the year at the beginning with a full page image opposite. I have used helvetica as the typeface (or swiss 721) – regular and bold – arial would suffice if one didn’t have either or those, and i’ve used lower case throughout. I think the body copy was 9.5 and the headings 11 points in size.

My design style is to keep everything as simple as possible and let the photographs do the talking. No need for colour, crazy fonts or any fancy design at all. So really, not much designing to do at all.

Note – the photos make the book look square but we got standard landscape shape.