One of the first questions I get from photographers about our books is "How am I going to create layouts for so many pages?!?"
At first building a 100 page or 200 or even 300 page book may seem daunting, but I think you'll find that designing layouts for COUTURE BOOK ends up being much easier and faster than designing books for flush mount style albums.
The inspiration for creating our book collections comes from looking at the fine art coffee table books by our favorite artists. The image layouts in these books are very simple and classic designs, designs that focuses on individual images rather than complicated layouts with multiple images. For instance, in an Annie Leibovitz book I recently picked up, it's almost all full bleed images and double page spreads. The images are amazing, and the layout focuses you on the images. Because each page is a single image your attention in only on that page, making that image much more powerful.
With our books, we encourage that style of design. We want you to take advantage of all of those pages. We want you give your customers tons of images, and still have them look fantastic, and we want your customers to rave about your images and treat their book like the fine art heirloom it should be.
Designing 100 pages in a flush mount style is daunting, but designing 100+ pages in a simple, classic style is EASY, and even better, it's much more flattering for your images.
With this in mind, we have three options for the 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. You can have our graphic designer create a custom layout for you: 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 focus on simplicity and your images. You'll tell me what type of design style you like, how many double page spreads (or not), and we'll build the layouts based on your input.
Here's a couple of links to custom layouts we've recently done:
http://couturebook.com/build/viewer.html?productId=100028087
http://couturebook.com/build/viewer.html?productId=100028577
http://couturebook.com/build/viewer.html?productId=100028197
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: You can design your book with 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 (9x6 books should be sized at 8.5x6). Once you have the blank canvas setup, start your layouts. Again, we recommend keeping your layouts focused on the images. Make them simple and clean with a lot of pano pages and full bleed pages.
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:
For more info on page specifications, check out this blog post: http://www.couturebook.com/blog/2008/07/03/PageLayoutFAQ.aspx
The other great thing about being able to offer this many pages, and keeping your design simple is it's much easier to offer more images to your customers in their books. Instead of having to pick their favorite 30 or 40 images from the 1500 images you edited down to, they can almost pick as many as they want! That eliminates one huge frustrating part of the design process. No longer are you or your customers agonizing over which images they love best, and which ones they have to cut. Instead you can include ALL of their favorites!