The first book I designed was a memoir written by an ancestor. In his later years he had throat cancer, and after one of his surgeries he couldn’t speak for quite a long time. During that time he wrote the story of his life–by hand, like with paper and ink. He then sent his handwritten memoir to his sister who typed it using her typewriter. After his death, I came across this typed document and made it my mission to put it into a format that could be shared with his family.
The process went like this:
First I scanned the entire document into a pdf file, then I used Adobe Acrobat to recognize the text and put it into a Microsoft Word Document. While the text recognition process is amazing, it is far from perfect, so there were many hours of proofreading.
The next step was designing the pages in InDesign and dropping in the text from Word. I had used Photoshop prior to this, but had little experience with InDesign–but through this project I fell in love with what InDesign can do, and learned so much!
I researched book design to learn about what kind of spacing I should use, how to format the headers and chapter first pages, etc. I researched front matter and back matter. I learned about styles and page templates. I found old photographs of the people and places referenced in the memoir. Basically, it’s a good thing I have a nack for research!
Then I added the images that needed to be incorporated. There were a few drawings that were incorporated into the memoir, and I added as many photographs as I felt were appropriate.
Finally, I designed the cover using a beautiful pencil drawing by the author. It was my favorite find and the perfect wrapper for his beautiful words!
One last proofread, paying special attention to formatting, and off to the presses. If you feel so inclined, the finished product is available here and I truly am proud of the result!