In today’s class of the layout course we are going to create a book from scratch. Cover, spine, back cover, flaps and obviously, the content 🙂
8.1 – Preparation of the book
As you can imagine, we will start by preparing everything we need. Images, texts, colors, fonts, etc. Let’s pack our bags for this fascinating journey.
We have given an example of a book with a high load of design so that you can see everything that can be done, but the one we will do next will be more classic. So let’s start with the first thing you see in a book. Indeed, once again, we are talking about the cover.
8.2 – Front and back cover
A book cover layout is a bit special, as apart from the front and back cover itself, it has two more key elements: The spine (depending on the length of the book) and flaps (optional). Let’s go there!
As you can imagine, the covers of a book are especially important. On the one hand, because it is what “sells” the book itself. And on the other hand, because all the sections must fit perfectly with the folds, or it can be fatal. Can you imagine that a piece of the flap “sneaks” into the cover? Or that the spine is partially displaced towards the back cover? In other words, we must always make sure to square everything to the millimeter.
8.3 – Base and master pages
Time now to establish the basis of “the guts” of the book, that is, where the text itself will go. We are going to see how many and what pages are usually placed at the beginning, and then we are going to set up the styles for all the chapters.
Well, we already have the base: Margins, headers and footers, heading and paragraph styles, etc. Congratulations, now we can go to do the most grateful part: the dump.
8.4 – Dump the book
It is true that until the last video we do not see what could be considered “the important thing” in a book: The text. But you will see how thanks to the work we have done before, this will be a moment. Let’s go there:
As you can imagine, there are many ways to layout a book, but here we wanted to focus on the most professional option, with all the details. Notice that we could have dumped the text directly and leave everything as it is, but the details that we have laid out make our book have a much more professional design.
The jumps to odd page in each chapter, the upper spaces and capital letters at the beginning of each chapter, the own styles of the titles, and even the customization of the header and footer increase the quality level of the finish substantially.
In this lesson we suggest you design your own book, whether it be with unpublished content, a reissue or even a compilation of your posts, it doesn’t matter. Now the idea is learn to layout these manuscripts. As always, for questions and queries, you can use the support form of the .
So, that’s all for today. See you in the next class, in which we will focus on another key aspect of the layout: The exciting world of exporting.
Remember that if you will have access to everybody the courses and you can also enjoy everything from .
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