ArtBook - Design to Finish

Yet another ArtBook came into the studio today, sweet! A lot has been mentioned about our ArtBooks in past posts so we won't go over it all again. Feel free to look back in time at some of our archives to learn more about the benefits.

Because we're getting a good number of calls from western Canada and clients in the States, we want to provide you with a good idea of what our books look like. We're forever trying to explain them over the phone - it just doesn't do justice. (the posts help our out of town clients - but you need to see them in real for the full 'wow')

Today I'll just mention a bit about the process of designing, online proofing and show the end result. We strive to keep our books simple and timeless. Part of that is keeping the designs clean:

• neutral backgrounds
• very little 'stacking' or overlapping of photos on top of each other
• not many 'drop shadows'
  
• no tilted or crooked images on the pages
• allow the images to speak for themselves with negative space for photos to 'breathe'

This isn't to say we haven't done more complex designs, we just want to provide clients with a book that will still look wonderful 10, 20 years from now. Most of our clients come to us wanting a book that looks like a magazine spread for Martha Stewart Weddings, or The Knot - just clean and classy. Which do you prefer?

Let's get to today's book, it's a bit more busy than Kira and Kris'; here is one of the proofing methods that we use so clients can view their book. The icon on the lower right brings you to a gallery view of all the spreads that are in your book, handy to jump from spread to spread or cover ground quickly.

After you have decided on which spreads and pages you'll keep or pull we do the final retouching to make you look your very best and send the order off to Europe.



5-6 weeks later you get this end result - a stunning story book of your day, and a treasured heirloom.