How to Make an Art Book

The nitty gritty and somewhat nerdy details behind the making of my new art book.

My book Imaginary Landscapes on one of the bookshelves in my work room.

At least this is how I made one. You should make one too!

I’m not usually someone that feels like the way I make things is of much direct value to other people. I feel the same about other artists’ work. I am interested in why artists make what they make and how they connect to a process for making but not as much in the techniques they might use.

I know that I primarily learn and discover from direct experience and less so from following someone else’s patterns.

In making my art book Imaginary Landscapes recently, I did realize that while prior experience doesn’t remove all of the friction from a process like making a book, it sure helps.

Because I have years of experience with design software, printing process, and more specifically making other books, I could approach making this new book with fewer doubts and gaps in my knowledge.

So I thought I would share some details from my specific process creating this book with the hope that some of the nitty gritty details might help others if they feel stuck in wanting to do the same thing.

I’ll break down my process into a few broad steps. The order and specifics of these may not match someone else’s project needs but should still highlight some of the main parts of the process.

I am calling the following sections “steps” but they don’t actually need to be linear and I would assume that you’ll jump back and forth between them in practice.

Step 1: Source Materials

Books are primarily framing devices for the text and images within so it can be helpful to take stock, prepare, refine, and edit source materials before starting to make a book.

It may seem odd not to start with a question like, “what sort of book am I making?” but thinking about what elements will form the core of a book can be useful in informing the eventual “shape” of a book.

Images

In my case, I had made a series of small square watercolour paintings a few years ago and I knew they would be the sole focus of the book.

I was very thankful to past me for making scans of the original 48 paintings. All but one of the originals have been sold so I am grateful for my forethought at the time. I’m not always that great at documenting my own work!

To save time, I scanned groups of paintings all at once on the scanner bed.

I scanned the paintings at 600dpi as RGB TIFF files on an older Epson Perfection 4990 flatbed scanner. That mild technical info isn’t overly important but just try to get the best reproduction you can of whichever visual source materials you might be working with.

To break that info down a bit…

• DPI stands for dots per inch which can mean different things these days with different forms of printing but it is essentially how much visual information is packed into each inch of an image.

• RGB most people might know stands for Red, Green, and Blue and is the short form for a more detailed colour model that a digital image uses to render an image.

• TIFF is an image file format (tagged image file format) which is often used for scanned image data. This isn’t all that important but a note that it’s best to avoid some file formats like JPEG since they can use “lossy” compression formats meaning each time they are resaved they might lose some image data/quality.

With the images scanned and on my computer, I could step back from them as individual images and see them as a series. I started to make choices about order, inclusion, pairings, and size.

One simple tool for doing that sort of work is to make a “contact sheet”. I printed out a grid of all of my possible images on our laser printer.

Contact sheets are for making quick editorial choices so they don’t need to be high quality.

I knew there would be both practical and aesthetic reasons that not all of the original images would make it into my book. So the contact sheet also helped me be less precious and make some cuts before any actual book work began.

Writing

My book has very little text and so I ended up doing all of that work during the design process.

But like source images, it can be helpful to have your text prepared before you think about design. There’s no single correct way of doing this.

• Index cards can be a great way to think about the book format. You can write on them with anything and they have the benefit of being reordered to help think about the flow of a book.

• Post-it notes are good too. Even better, the index card sized ones since you can grab a free patch of wall and work out your page order while standing back and getting a better holistic view of things.

• The text data can be entered wherever you feel the least friction. Write in the simple notes app on your phone, use Google Docs, or use software like Scrivener. In the end, you just need formatted text that you can copy or import into whichever layout software you end up using.

I like to mix physical and digital processes so with both image and writing materials I think it’s best to not assume this as a linear process. You can go back to contact sheets and index cards even after a book is mid-design. I would recommend that actually. Physicality can snap you out of some of the boxes of digital.

Step 2: Setup

Okay, let’s start thinking about the shape of the book.

By that I mean the literal square or rectangular format of the book but also its size, the paper, how it’s bound, the printing, etc. This is where things can get daunting because the number of possibilities is vast.

It’s why I think starting with the source materials can help. For the Imaginary Landscapes book I knew I was working with square original paintings. The paintings were also very small at 3×3″. So those physical factors nudged me towards making a small and square book.

Some of these choices may be made for you. On-demand print companies like Blurb or Mixam, will have fixed formats they will print and the same is mostly true of traditional publishers that have styles and sizes of books for particular markets (and also simply how many books fit in predetermined shipping boxes). So if you aren’t making your book by hand, the physical shape of your book may fall into some of the standard formats most companies make available.

For my book, I ended up deciding to use Mixam. A note here that nothing in this post is sponsored and any services or tools I have used aren’t endorsements.

I’ve used a few other on-demand services in the past with a mixture of results. We are now in a time where many printing services are far more accessible than ever before because of the internet, software, and advances in digital printing. I won’t go into that stuff in any detail but it’s all much much easier than it ever has been.

I’m also not suggesting any particular means of making a book. But there are lots available.

• On-demand printing has the primary benefit of making very small print run possible. The cost per book is usually fairly high.

• Traditional offset printing through dedicated print shops has the plus of attention to detail and quality. This option also allows for colour range, paper selection, and custom binding, tipping, and trim options that on-demand is unlikely to ever offer. Books will usually need to be printed in larger runs (250+ books at one time) but the cost per book may be lower.

• Indie/Small presses can give you both personal access to people that care deeply about making handmade books and may include unique processes like RISOgraphic printing. Shorter print runs are the norm and the cost per book is relatively high.

• Pure DIY book making means it’s all literally in your hands and the process is opened up to loads of interesting flexibility and variation. Because it’s all on you and the materials and processes you choose, it’s harder to determine the cost per book. Be guaranteed that a LOT of sweat equity will go into making your own books but the rewards can be very high!

I chose on-demand printing for my book because I knew I couldn’t make what I wanted on my own given the time, materials, and equipment I have access to. I also didn’t have the money to pay for the upfront costs of a larger print run through an offset or indie printer — though those are the options I would choose if I had the money.

Alright so let’s dig into print setup.

One of the reasons I chose Mixam over other on-demand printing options was their wide range of book sizes. Even the fact that they have multiple square format options was good for what I wanted.

I chose to make a 7″ square book.

Mixam (and most other on-demand services) has their own bespoke layout software and also allows for custom designs made with a variety of tools that allow PDF output.

Because I have the prior experience with it and access to the software, I chose to design my book in Adobe InDesign. Page layout software has always had a smaller of options but it is starting to expand somewhat. Here are a few other options but I won’t pretend this is an exhaustive list…

• Affinity Publisher

• Quark XPress

• Microsoft Publisher

• Canva

• Google Docs

• Pages

• Spectrolite

It really depends on what your needs are and what your budget for software is. The learning curve and cost on something like InDesign might not be worth the hassle if you just want to experiment with print layout.

Whichever tool you choose there will be a few basic things you’ll want to consider before you can get down to the fun part of designing the book.

Colour Model

I mentioned earlier that the scanned images of my paintings were RGB files.

While it is dependent on which printing method/service you choose, the norm for most printing is to use a CMYK colour model for all printed assets.

• CMYK stands for Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and Black and layers of these colours are used to create full-colour images in the majority of printing you see day to day.

There are exceptions of course and by using offset or RISO printing services you can add fewer or more printed colours but I won’t dive down that rabbit hole here.

Working with Mixam required CMYK source files so I needed to convert my RGB scans to CMYK. This is easy enough in lots of programs — I used Photoshop. Switching colour models can cause images to change tone or contrast so make the shift on copies of any images you have.

The colour model your print service requests will also affect things like how text colours are set in the software you choose. If you get serious about making full colour books there are resources like Pantone matching guides which show high quality printed swatches with colour model data.

Working with printed halftones and colour matching between screens and paper can be both an art and a science unto itself. Depending on your project and what method you choose for printing there can be distinct quality shifts and also changes in access to print professionals.

On-demand printing has come a long way now and you are often being matched up with a print shop semi-local to you when placing an on-demand print order. Most of them seem to be using some flavour of HP Indigo digital press these days so the quality differences between on-demand services shouldn’t be huge.

Trim Size

Much commercial printing is done on large sheets or rolls of paper. When we make a book of a certain size, like my 7×7″ book, its pages are often ganged up for printing on the larger paper size and then trimmed to the bound size afterwards.

Because of this there are a few lightly technical things you might want to know about how those pages are cut and bound. Many services will tell you to allow for a certain amount of “bleed” and they may also talk about “trim-safe” margins.

Most services will also have downloadable template files in one or more formats to help with file setup.

Both of these terms refer to the outer edges of a book page and the tolerance or variability in where cuts happen.

The Document Setup panel for my book in InDesign.

Bleed refers to printed elements that you want to go right to the edges of a page. That could be a “full bleed” photograph that fills an entire page or even a single flat colour that fills the trimmed page. Because print trimming can have subtle variation, you need to extend those printed elements into a range requested by your print service. What this can mean is that for something like a photo filling a page, a small fraction of the image will be lost.

One of the facing page spreads from my book shown in InDesign with margins and bleed guides visible.

The other layout aspect similarly affected by trim tolerance are things like page numbers in corners or any text that comes close to the printed or folded page edge. There are lots of other visual reasons to have clear margins for text blocks in books but trim-safe margins just make sure that everything that should be in the page is there.

Binding

Books can take a variety of forms and a large part of that is how the pages are bound together. You’ll see terms like saddle-stitched, perfect, or case binding. Or others like spiral, coil, and comb binding.

Some publications may be self bound like single-sheet folded or accordion folded zines or mini-books.

My small book like many larger page count zines, chapbooks, or pamphlets was saddle-stitched. Saddle-stitching mostly refers to small publications that are a single stack of folded pages with staples at the fold holding the book together. This is a nice simple method that is very achievable at home with a normal or long arm stapler.

There are a few functional limits to saddle-stitch bound books.

• Page counts of saddle-stitched books must be in multiples of four since each sheet of folded paper makes up four pages.

• Because the pages are folded over themselves, there is a natural page limit due to all that paper being wedged into a single thin attachment point. The “danger” of saddle-stitched books with too many pages is they never really close well and tend too have a kind a bulge in the middle. “Too many” pages in the case of saddle-stitched is some somewhere between 32 and 64 depending on interior and cover paper weight (thickness).

• Folding of pieces of paper over on themselves also causes them to fan out at the non-bound side and that side is often trimmed off to flattery that edge. This is easy for commercial printers to do with large cutters but a bit more of a hassle at home. It also means that any pages at closer to the centre fold will have subtly thinner outer margins because of the relative amount trimmed off.

I chose to make my book 32 interior pages plus a heavier weight cover for a total of 36 pages. I chose a fairly heavy matte paper stock for the interior pages as well so I knew any higher page count and my book would always kind of flop open.

One of the spreads from my book shown in InDesign with the Pages panel open showing the facing pages view.

Perfect binding is the other most common choice. Most softcover books and many magazines are perfect bound. In this type of binding, the pages are cut at the centre fold and glued into a flat flexible spine. It means page counts can be much higher and there isn’t the “creep” of pages like saddle-stitching so the outer edge has a uniform trim.

Case binding is what most hardcover books use. In case binding, pages are grouped into folded “signatures” which are 8, 16, or 32 pages. These are a bit like the fold of a saddle-stitched book but in multiples that are sewn together and mounted to the hard cover board.

I’ve made a few case bound books by hand myself and they are labour intensive but the result is wonderful. Because of the materials and labour involved, case bound books are more expensive to produce no matter which printing service you choose.

Step 3: Design

It may seem strange that I have design listed after talking about printing but like I said earlier, you need to know the “shape” of your book before many interior design choices can be made.

Because I chose to use the square format of my original paintings as my book’s ratio, some design decisions felt fairly straightforward to me.

When placing images of paintings at their original 3×3″ size, they felt good to my eye in the centre of pages with titles below them.

InDesign spread view showing 100% image scans placed in the centre of the page margins.

For a bunch of the spreads, I made editorial choices to pair images in left and right pages that have a connection in terms of tone, colour, and/or location.

Because I love the textures and almost fractal nature of how watercolour paint can react with paper, I also chose to scale some paintings so that they were full bleed. I tried to keep these to a minimum and many of the paintings I chose to scale up were the more abstract ambient landscapes.

For most of the paintings I prefer the original miniature sizing. Something about that size viewed at arm’s length feels right to me. They’re all fairly distant views so I like that relative visual distance.

Spread with coloured frame.

I wanted to keep these overall design elements very simple with the focus remaining on the paintings. But for a few of the spreads I “eye-droppered” (selects a single pixel’s colour data) single colours from the left page image to use as tinted frames for the right page image.

That’s part of the benefit of working with artwork in book form — there can be play with spacing and colour outside of the original work. I didn’t want the book to feel white box gallery stagnant. I’ve always appreciated exhibitions that displayed work on non neutral backgrounds. A book, like a good gallery exhibit, should have its own set of narratives and character.

Some of the images get transformed to me based on their framing colour.

A short note about the typeface I chose. Other than a short introduction, most of the text in my book are the painting titles.

While I have numerous more traditional typefaces I could have used, I wanted something a bit quirky. I was looking around and liked the blocky nature of the typeface Chakra Petch, designed by Carson Demak for Google Fonts.

For the cover, I drew a rendition of the interior typeface in Procreate and overlaid it on the cover painting.

The typeface has an almost sci-fi meets Wim Crouwel (Dutch graphic and type designer) feel to it. What you wouldn’t guess is that while I’m only using the Latin character set for my book, Chakra Petch is a Thai-language font designed by a Thai design studio. I almost wish I could have used some Thai in my book because it’s a beautiful language and it looks amazing in this font.

Side note on this side note… Google Fonts gets a bad wrap, but they have some very well made font families in the mix.

Step 4: Printing

When I felt good about what I was seeing in InDesign, I browsed to the Mixam site and started the order process.

Here’s the breakdown of my initial order:

• 20 copies

• saddle-stitched binding

• CMYK printing

• 32 interior pages on 80lb uncoated paper

• 120lb uncoated cover with outer and interior printing

I exported my book design from InDesign as a PDF. Mixam has a few options for file types they will accept but their PDF process seemed the most straightforward.

Mixam’s document import system.

I did run into an issue initially since I had made a single 36-page InDesign file including the four pages for the cover. Mixam wants three files: front cover, interior, and back cover. This was easy enough for me to do by duplicating my InDesign file and removing pages but I do wish their tool could just be told that a file contained the cover layout.

Because Mixam’s tool is visual and labels each page it imports, it’s easy to make sure everything is correct. They also have a quick preview mode that shows the uploaded book pages in an onscreen flippable form.

Flip book preview.

They also have per-page previews and a full downloadable digital proof that gave me enough confidence that all of the bleeds and positioning looked correct.

Preview that clearly shows the trim and bleed options for a single page.

This is one of the possible negatives of on-demand printing there aren’t the options to see physical printed proofs or to do in-person press checks. Having worked on other projects that allowed me to go in person to a print shop and work directly with a very seasoned print tech, I missed that level of confidence.

But I live in a small town now and so a print shop visit wasn’t in the cards. Plus as you’ll note from my Mixam order list above I only had 20 copies of my book made in the initial print run — most print shops won’t really deal in tiny numbers like that.

Once I double and triple checked Mixam’s digital proofs, I plonked down my credit card and waited.

I was quite happy with the turnaround time but do be prepared to wait for up to two weeks or so if you go this route.

Happy box of books!

Almost nothing is more exciting than opening a box of freshly printed books you have made.

Okay! That is how I made my book. I hope the details of my process give you some insight into what was involved and some pathways you can take if this is something you would like to try.

I honestly recommend this to any artist. There’s something special about editing, shaping, and eventually holding in your hands a book of your own.

Thanks for reading!