Creating Beautiful Books

When we started COUTURE BOOK, we did it because we weren’t satisfied with the boring, stale board style albums that were available.  We wanted our images to be presented in fine-art style books just like the coffee-table books that we had by our favorite artists. These books were much more contemporary and modern, and had a much more timeless design and layout.   They also tended to have a lot of pages, and a lot of full bleed images.

We found that this style of printing and binding wasn’t normally available outside of really large printing runs, so our goal was to make it available as a one-off, custom made book.  That way we could provide our customers with their own fine-art books that would look at home on their coffee-table or bookshelf with all of their other books.

However, the key to these books is not just the physical process of printing and binding, but just as important is the design process.   Grab any one of your coffee-table books, even better grab your favorite one by your favorite photographer (lately my favorite has been Annie Liebovitz – “A Photographer’s Life 1990-2005″).  When you sit down and look at them, take a hard look at the design and layouts.   They are usually very simple, and really focus on the images.

For instance in the Annie Liebovitz book there is never more than two images per page, most pages are single images or panoramic images that span two pages.  This style of design allows your viewer to focus on each image individually.  The design is only there to help highlight each image.  This is very different from the designs I commonly see in board albums, albums where you have a very limited amount of pages and have many images compete for the same space on the page.

With this in mind, our books start with up to the first 100 pages in the base price, and can go all the way up to 300 pages!

We want to encourage that simple style of design, we want you to take advantage of all of those pages, and we want you give your customers a ton of images but still have them look fantastic!

I know creating a layout for all of those pages may seem daunting at first, but with the simple, classic design style, it’s actually VERY easy and quick… and even better, it’s much more flattering for your images!

With this in mind, we have three options for your book layouts:
1. Design using our online templates: With this option, it keeps the layouts very simple.  The online design tool gives you a single image per page with different border options.  To check out this option, just head to the site and upload some images to a sample project.  That will let you preview the layout tool and see how easy it is to create a fine art style layout.

2. Custom layout by our graphic designer: With this option, you’ll upload all of the images to our site, and our graphic designer will create a completely custom layout for you.  These layouts are custom tailored to your specifications, and to the style of your photography.   You’ll tell us what type of design style you like, and we’ll build the layouts based on your input.
For custom layouts, we recommend a minimum of 100 images (maximum of around 400).  Just upload your images to a new project and let me know when you have it ready.   We’ll then follow up to get your book specifications and general style guidelines, and we’ll get started on your custom design right away.

3. You can design your own custom layouts: If you’d like more control and some additional custom layouts, you can absolutely do your own custom design.  You can use any program you like, just as long as you can export your final layouts as Jpeg files.  Create your layouts on canvases sized at the exact book size at 300 dpi.    Make your designs simple and clean with a lot of pano pages and full bleed pages.   You’ll be surprised at how beautiful and powerful your book will be.

Also, don’t be afraid to leave blank pages or blank space.  You have a ton of real-estate to work with and sometimes a blank page can really accent the image on the other page:

Hope that helps, and happy designing!

-COUTURE BOOK