gee, maybe I should make some books for me…

Originally published at pixels, light and hot wax. You can comment here or there.

I am in a take-a-breath moment in the holiday album design onslaught at the moment, and when I was putting some client albums up on blurb, I saw (clever them) a little popup about how they were doing notebooks now.  I tend to have 2-3 notebook/sketchbooks going at any one time, and it bums me out that the only ones I can usually find with gridded pages are moleskine, which aren’t the right size and aren’t pretty.

So I made one. It took maybe 10 minutes, and that’s NOT my book design expertise talking. I am pleased.  It’s mostly photos from the Oregon coast landscape photography workshop from 2009 because well, my camera and I don’t talk too much lately with all the busy.

The default layout has a picture every 7ish pages, and all the rest grid. On uncoated paper that can be written on. Yay!

(Yeah, that is an affiliate link, because I don’t mark up the blurb books I make, but I send them lots of business, so one of my colleagues pointed out that a bonus for me that doesn’t cost my customers anything is a good thing. And while I’ve got the business hat on, if you wanna go gonzo and make your own, HOLIDAYTHANKS gets you 25% off through ”cyber monday” on books you make, and MERRY will work on other people’s books.)

And that is just a little something on top of this big gorgeous thing:

I started carrying a new kind of flush album; it’s really stripped down as flush albums go, with superthin pages, limited cover design choices, mostly things you only notice if you make a lot of albums, really, and all streamlining rather than quality reduction. And the pricing is amazing as such things go, right in the range a lot of my more “budget” clients are aiming for. (Budget being a relative term when you are talking about custom designed, handmade photo-page books.) So I needed samples, stat, but I was in love with the 12×12, and I didn’t have any 20 page 12×12 designs hanging out that I could use.  But, well, I did have a set of really awesome photos that are intended to be seen only REALLY LARGE and this thing is 2 feet wide when open, so …. I made myself a super luxe artist portfolio. That I totally got the studio sample discount on because I really am going to use it to show wedding album clients.

(Pictures are craptastic because it is raining and I haven’t fetched my lights back from the person I lent them to yet.)

for scale, that’s my cell phone:

Isn’t it pretty? I want to pet it. (You can see the whole design here if you like). The photos are smaller than they are when I show them as framed prints, but still big enough to get the right SO MUCH BIGGER THAN LIFESIZE effect.

(Sorry if this sounds super-promotey, but you have to understand, BOOKS! that I get to KEEP and USE instead of mailing away! It’s like working in a chocolate shop and never getting to eat any to do what I do normally. )