Deconstructing An 80x10 Tradebook
Lesson 6 from: Create a Trade Book with Blurb BookWrightDan Milnor
Deconstructing An 80x10 Tradebook
Lesson 6 from: Create a Trade Book with Blurb BookWrightDan Milnor
Lesson Info
6. Deconstructing An 80x10 Tradebook
Lessons
Lesson Info
Deconstructing An 80x10 Tradebook
Okay, so the next thing I want to do is show you a book that's already been completed. It's also an eight by 10 trade book, and I want to show you this because I think it's a perfect example of the kind of books that you could do in book, right. It's very professional looking. It's very sophisticated looking. But when we break it down, which is what we're gonna do in a minute, when we break it down, you realize it's not as complex as it looks. It actually just looks very professional, very slick. But the components behind the scenes are pretty are pretty simple. And this is a book A lot of people use blurb to make cookbooks and Children's books. They're very hot right now, Thankfully, because we've been exposed to all these people who are chefs and and great cooks. That may or may not be me known is that professionally? But this is the book that I want to talk about, and if we jump here into the software and I open the software here and I go to the cover tab, you'll see that the author...
can Tall has This is how he has designed and laid out the cover. Now you'll notice that Kent is using grids and grids. Are these light blue or science lines that are moveable and grids are great. If you have precise measurements that you want to do within the software, you confined the grids up here at the top. Under this grid line, I watch when I click this on and off, you'll see the grids appear and disappear. Now I'll leave him on for this sample case. I don't necessarily use grids a lot, but I know a lot of people who do design full time, and they're they're huge fans of the grid. So it's just one way of doing things Now, if you look at this, you'll notice the cover looks really beautiful. There's multiple levels working here in layers working, and I just want to move some of these components around and show you. So what you've got working here is your cover text is just one simple box of text and all you do. If I click inside that, it just shows me what he's done here with the font so I can highlight some of this font and see what he's used. Calvert 100 point font, etcetera. And when I close this and move it around again, I'll move it up here just for demonstration purposes. You've also got a second little text box down here, and the third thing is this background image. The main primary image here on the background is a one single photograph. So again, the complexity of that page looks fantastic, but it's actually made up of very few components. And I think this is encouraging for anyone who's never made a book. Because it's not like every single aspect of this page was a separate box or separate step. It's basically 3 to 4 components that make up the entire cover. That's a very interesting observation to have and know that you, too, can make books like this just by experimenting with two or three components. Okay, so let's go to the pages, Doc. And there's a few other things that I want to highlight here. A few other pages, and I want to deconstruct them as well to show you what what's made of what they're made of. So you'll notice here. He's used a background color. He's gone up here to the background to the eyedropper, and he's selected yellow, which is, frankly, a very bold and brave color choice. You don't see a lot of books with yellow pages, but in this case, the yellow fits the feel of the book. It also fits some of the ingredients in the recipes that he's showing in the book, so it's actually a very smart use of color. But what he's done is he's just converted the background to yellow, and then also you look, it's just another text box on top of the background, and I'll move this textbook out just to show you here. But look what he's done inside the text box. I think this is pretty, pretty, pretty smart. So if I highlight this top font here, you'll notice it's Arvo at d d. P I. Black. But if I scroll down in the same text box, he's used the same font, but a 12 point and it gray. So he didn't even have to use a second text box to create this payout. This page of this layout it's basically right there, and that's the entire page. So again it looks sophisticated and complex, but it's actually not. It's a process that you can learn in a very short amount of time. So scrolling down, even more coming to another page. And this one really tricked even me. And I've looked at a lot of different blurb books over the years, and I looked at this page and I thought, Wow, this is really, really complex, and this would probably take me a long time to do, And I'm just gonna focus primarily here on the right hand page. I want you to notice that all of his content is inside this pink safe area, which we talked about before. So you want to make sure that the primary contact is in there now. I thought this was a very complex page again, but when you break it down and you run the cursor over it, you'll see that basically, it's three photo boxes that he's created in the size that he wants, and I'll move them around here like this and three text boxes. So again, again, the same great great type, the same font, three text boxes. So this page again, it's made up of six total components. It's really not that complex you're making three photos and three text box. But yet look at how that page looks. It's a fantastic looking OK, so let's move on to one more. And then I also want to show you the rhythm. We talked earlier about sequencing of a book, and I think that's also very important. And this is another good example of what you can do with good sequencing. So this last page again, I looked at this and I thought, Wow, this is again pretty complicated. I'm not sure I'd be able to figure this out. And then I just went in and started moving components around and again, replicating what we saw in the last page photo boxes and text boxes, and then also boxes for my headers in my titles. And you start to realize that great design is not necessarily complex design. It can be simple design just used intelligently together, and you'll end up with pages like this, which I think are really beautiful and a great sample of what you can do with this. And again, this is an eight by trade book. We talked earlier very early in this presentation about sequencing and again sequencing is the roller coaster or the narrative arc that you're taking people on. And I noticed going through here where you have pages like we're looking at right now, which is a pretty complex page. But then soon after, you'll have a page like this, which is a single, bold, straightforward photograph that mixes up the flow of this book. So again, those those complex pages or the ones that appear like they're more complex, they're going to slow you down a little bit. You're gonna have to pay attention to the small type. You're gonna have to pay attention to the small photographs. But then your brain almost needs, Ah, vacation from those type of pages and you come back with a spread like this, which is just simply about you staring at another beautiful cookbook, another option of what you're seeing. So in essence, that's a few of these pages basically deconstructed so that you get get an idea of how relatively simple they are, even when they look sophisticated and professional. So we've gone through all of the major components of how this software works, and I just want to remind you again about the practicing in the patient's. We've all sat down in front of computers many, many times in our lives, and we've looked at many different new Softwares. I do this all the time, and there's always that little sense of apprehension or even dread at the beginning of saying to yourself, Do I really want to learn a new piece of software When I look at software in the grand scheme of things, Blur book right is a very simple tool, but it's going to require you to take a test driver to like any other software. So again, be patient with it. Have fun experiment and the real. The real key is to just start something. Start small, make yourself happy by making a small publication, uploading it, printing it, etcetera. So let's say that this was our publication and we're ready to go. The last step in the process is just simply to hit the upload button. And when you hit the upload button, it's going to say, Do you want to save changes to this document? And I'm going to say save and it's gonna bring up your sign in for your blurb account, and this is the same information that you'll sign in with. When you go to blurb dot com. You'll sign up. You'll hit the upload button and depending on the size of your book, whether you made a 20 page book or a 400 page book, your upload speed will depend on the size of the document you made. We're not gonna go through the upload process right now. Otherwise, it would take more time than we would want to spend. And you're going to sign in. Your book is now going to reside on the blurb site. So in essence, in a nutshell, that is how you use Blur book, right to make a trade book or a magazine or photo book. It's the same process in the same tool. You could make all these different things. So good luck, have fun, have patients and make books.
Ratings and Reviews
a Creativelive Student
This course is about how to use Blurb, not about how to make a book. What I mean is, it is helpful for people who have made books and/or photo albums before and want to learn how to use Blurb. It was also helpful to me as someone who has already made a few Blurb books already but wanted to learn to use it better. I definitely learned a couple things, and given that I watched it during a free broadcast, it was totally worth the price of admission (in my case, 60 minutes of my time). In my case, I learned that Blurb has downloadable icc profiles as well as the ability to make low-res proof pdfs. As someone who learned Blurb by downloading the program and clicking away (from time to time searching some online forums) these are extremely useful things I wouldn't have known about any other way. What the course does not do, however, is teach you how to make a book. It names all the steps (color management, edit, sequence ...) and how important they are, but don't expect anything but a shout out to help you remember to do it well. As examples: The section on color management is basically "Remember to calibrate your screen and soft proof using an icc profile." If you don't know what either of those mean, this course won't teach you what it is, much less how to do it. Secondly: he shows you how to add a background color to your pages, but nothing about when to do that, why to do that, and how to do it well. A last example: Daniel's most important advice is to "edit tight" -- SUPER important but for me, really difficult. Unfortunately, Daniel doesn't go into how to go about doing so. He doesn't even give tips about what to think about when culling down your own photos. I'd have paid a lot of money to watch him cull photo's for two or three books, listening to his thought process while he chooses which photos to include and which to cry over and then leave out. To do all these things would have required a day-long course rather than an hour-long course, but for me, that course would have been far more helpful. It probably have been useful for people using other programs and/or vendors as well. What the course does do, of course, is explain the Blurb BookWright software. You COULD teach yourself by pressing buttons and searching on-line forums like I did. Or, you could watch this course, save yourself a lot of time, and get information you didn't even think to ask about. Since the course goes through all the basic buttons, the course could be useful to an absolute beginner photo album maker, which is what Daniel clearly wants to achieve. He spends a lot of time trying to encourage people who have never made a book before. In my opinion, an absolute beginner book / photo album maker could learn a lot more by starting out with a far more "let me do a lot of this for you" type of program. You know the type I mean? The program that comes with (perhaps cheesy) themes, clip-art, frames, etc.? That way, see the possibilities and develop a sense of what you like before you use something like BookWright, where any and all objects that end up on the page have been created and placed by the person making the book. Doing so will give you far more ideas when you start creating entire spreads ex nihilo on your own. Then, if you want to switch to Blurb, you can watch this course (before or after you've made a couple books just using trial and error). That background will increase the chances that (if you're lacking a degree in publishing) you'll be able to piece together what Daniel's talking about when he uses the specific publishing industry vocabulary.
user 89d27e
Thank you. We are just starting to write our own recipe book and this popped up on Creative Live. It was very helpful, thank you for it :)
Lianne Kruger
Dan gave some good information on * how to layout a book * some good helps with the main page of bllurb. * some entering photos on the screen and layout I do not agree that this is a trade book. He did not go through how to add text with a photo. A trade book to me would be instructions along with photos. He did not show how to do that. The course is supposed to be a trade book