Publication: Memorias de México Notebook

I was inspired my Daniel Milnor’s creations on Blurb.com not too long ago as I wrote in this post so I decided to dive into creating a notebook myself.  I’ve been very excited about it but haven’t been able to write about it because I wanted it to be a surprise for my family.  Thankfully the notebooks arrived from Blurb the other day and I in turn shipped them out to my siblings, parents, and their families.  The cover of the book is shown above; the back cover is below.

All of the images except the one on the inside cover were taken during my recent trip to Mexico. The notebook is 5×8 and printed on 60lb paper; with high contrast black and white images. The cover and back cover are color. This book is intended to be used a journal of sorts but lends itself to many creative possibilities. It is wide ruled, but I also created the same book for my wife in college-rule as well as another for myself with blank pages.

Although this isn’t the first time I’ve used Blurb’s BookSmart software to work on a book, this is the first project I have completed. The book itself was easy to make as the software is pretty intuitive and customizable. This customizability is something I have really enjoyed as I have previously created books on Shutterfly and Costco’s MyPublisher program. Those book publishers are easy to work with and create a decent product but are limited in terms of layout options. I also like that BookSmart is a program that lives on my computer and uses compressed thumbnails of my images while creating the book. This allows for quick selection and changes as well as only having to upload those full resolution images I actually use in the book once I am ready to publish (I tend to import all the images I might use and then select while I am creating layout). Shutterfly requires upload on the front end-a needlessly time-consuming step.

The tricky part for me in creating this notebook was in determining its purpose. Originally I thought to create a notebook of creative black and white images depicting our family vacation in Mexico. As I moved along in photo selection and editing (the inside images need to be black and white and have their contrast boosted so they print well on the notebook paper) I needed to modify my creative endeavor with the end-user in mind: my family. This took a bit of doing as I wanted all 19 family members represented but I didn’t want this to be a book of snapshot portraits. Rather, what I wanted to create was something that represented the feel of the vacation experience as I remembered it. Given that I don’t generally shoot with black and white in mind while in Mexico, this made me really stretch creatively regarding subject matter, composition, image enhancement, and cropping.

To say I worked hard at it would be fair. To say I grew artistically as a result would be fair as well. To say I am excited and motivated to create more would be fair as well. So, that means I will be making some more notebooks in the months to come. This one is likely to not be for public sale as it is more family oriented but I hope to make another Mexico notebook, a gratitude notebook (to be used to note daily gratitudes), a Zen images notebook, and hopefully a Mexico picture book depicting my view of Mexico through its gorgeous colors. When these are published I will make them available through “Purchase” link at the top of the page.