Book Design and Photoshop

A Beautiful Unfolding Commissioned by – Mary Lyons – Canberra – 2018

I was initially commissioned by Mary Lyons for Photoshop of images. She was extremely happy with the work so one year later she appoached me to do the book design. The book was intended to be a small coffee table book that was a true expression of Mary’s creativity, with poems and photography.

Mary had no design experience so we started with an edited Word Document. The spreads were broken into 400 single pages but after a  consult we decided that it could be condensed into 260 pages. The budget was 100 hours. To indicate a final result I broke the job into 5 to 6 template designs (10% budget) and then artwork (90% budget). This was a great way to give a very clear idea of what the book would look like within the first 5-10 hours. Once these templates were approved I was able to populate the remaining 150 pages with the confidence of a great result.

Result

Mary was very happy with the end result and of 2020 we are now working on a condensed version of the book with all the bells and whistles. This will include custom illustration throughout and premium print finishing.The new book should take a few months to finalise. In which case we will run about 20 copies for print publishers then larger print runs once a publishing deal is confirmed.