Making Housewarming: Part 8, Book Design!
Hello! Welcome to “Making Housewarming,” our series on this here blog about how we created our debut book from start to finish—everything from how we decided what we wanted to create to organizing photoshoots to finding the right publisher and a whole lot more. We’ll be covering a different part of the process every week for ten weeks (this is week eight!), so make sure to check back in or join our weekly newsletter so you don’t miss anything!
Scroll to the very bottom of this post where you’ll find each post in the series and catch yourself up to speed. Or don’t! I’m not your mom!
One of the biggest questions and concerns we had for the entire year of writing the manuscript, and then doing the photoshoot, and creating the artwork, was… how the hell is this all gonna go together? Not that we didn’t think it would all work well together, but more like… literally how is this going to be put together onto the pages of our book. We certainly had our own ideas for how all the elements would be visually arranged but since neither of us are graphic designers, it was still a little cloudy. Did we have much say in exactly where everything went? Where a tiny paint chip illustration would butt into the text, how large a photograph will appear, etc? Well, turns out, yes, we did have a say, but also it’s a crap ton of work so our hands would be held by a talented and fastidious book designer.
Our publisher, Abrams, sent us a list of designers they work with both in house and as contracted talent, and samples of their work, and told us “pick one!". There were several fantastic options, but we chose to work with Danielle Youngsmith because her work was stunning, and we could see similarities between her past projects and the book we wanted our book to be.
Danielle’s job became way more critical than we really first expected. We knew of course how important our editor would be for fine-tuning our words and giving us feedback on high-level items like what topics should and shouldn’t be included; we knew our photographer would be key to creating gorgeous photos; our illustrator obviously was major for making the artwork pop. But none of that stuff—the words and the gorgeous photos and the beautiful whimsical artwork—would really shine unless it was arranged intentionally and carefully on a page, with great attention to detail that allowed each of the three categories to seemingly fall into place and feel just right.
Luckily, she liked the book concept and was able to immediately get to work organizing everything into a huge ginormous massive document, even though we still hadn’t finished all of the photos and the final illustrations were a while out. She was able to organize the manuscript and leave space where she imagined (or where we had notated) that images or photos would go. The first draft was mostly just text with a few of the existing images plugged in, and then big gray boxes with a description of what would eventually go in its place. Putting together a book layout while missing 70% of the visuals, like, cannot be an easy thing to do.
But it was also so useful for us to see, because once we had an idea of even the most simple stuff like how many words would fill a page and what size the font would be, we were able to adjust as needed. And there was a lot of adjusting.
It’s not a clean process, or at least it wasn’t for us, and maybe that’s our fault because we had literally no experience. I bet it’s pretty typical for first time authors though, especially when creating a book with so many moving parts. Danielle, and our editor, Laura, never complained when we had to totally change certain parts of the manuscript to fit the book, or add art work last minute to help illustrate a point, or to change photos based on how the color story was going. In fact, while each “pass” of the book shaped up to be hugely improved from the previous one, we continued to have alterations—that got fewer and fewer as the drafts progressed—to the photography and artwork and the text right up until the final pass, when we finally were able to cut only a word or two here and there and adjusted the contrast on a photograph or so. Then it was considered final and sent to print.
We’re so happy with how the final layout looks, and have learned so much about what goes into the nitty gritty of bringing a book like this to life. Maybe most importantly, we learned how key it is to let the pros you’re collaborating with, like our book designer, do their thing. Prior to creating this book we had never had to collaborate much with anyone on anything, apart from one another, so it was a great learning experience for us in relying on a team of experts!
And so that’s the briefer on how it all came together! Lots of and lots eyeballs on the same material, over and over again until it was just right. We hope you’ll join in and follow along as we count down the weeks to our book’s publication! You can subscribe to our weekly newsletter to make sure you don’t miss a thing, and preorder Housewarming if you haven’t already! Below you’ll find all of the previous posts in this series, ready for your viewing :)
