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Using Adobe Creative Suite for Album Design - part 4 of 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

by Tom Lee Published 01/10/2009

Blurb provide excellent templates for both the pages of your book/album and the cover. A number of options are available for binding the cover.

The Blurb Experience

Blurb is an online book-creation service for general use. However, some wedding photographers have started to make books using Blurb for their lower-end requirements or parents' albums and the like. The website uploads your files to the USA and you pay by credit card and in about two weeks a finished book arrives on your doorstep. The printing press is a Hewlett-Packard Indigo, the same as used by a number of high-end album producers. Of significance to this feature is the fact that Blurb very recently set up a pdf workflow enabling designers to employ InDesign for their albums and upload directly with a press-ready pdf.

Blurb can be used for any form of book-creation ranging from albums to portfolios and encompassing dummy books if you are about to publish. The cost is such that it is just feasible to create books for sale although this method of publishing is normally reserved for specialised, university text-books with very low run-offs and high cost. The quality point is a little short of 'limited edition' short-run art books although some people have tried it on!

For our own Blurb trial we chose a real book that has just been completed. We needed a proof copy to wave at potential bulk purchasers, ahead of the actual book being printed. The first issue was that our final book is a different size to the standard ones from Blurb, but this enabled us to use the 'automatic layout adjustment' feature of InDesign. This is accessed through Layout>Layout Adjustment, where you set up what happens when you go to File>Document Set Up and change the page size. Depending upon how graphic objects lie in relation to page guides and margins, the graphics are re-sized to the new shape of your publication. The transformation is not perfect, but usually only leaves a couple of items requiring manual adjustment. We can see uses here if a bride decides at the last moment that she would like a larger album! In our 146-page example we had about three text boxes and five images in need of manual adjustment.

Having completed the design adjustment we made press-ready pdfs using the settings imported from the Blurb website. Initially we made a mistake and set the bleed all around. This caused the document to fail the automatic pre-flight and we were asked to resubmit a corrected pdf by an automated response. The second upload also failed because the page size was incorrect. This seemed to be a mix up between the conversion factor we used for point size. We changed our units to 'points' in InDesign and made a third, successful attempt at uploading. This was not a trivial exercise, each upload took 40 minutes and we could add to that another 30 minutes per attempt to figure out where we had gone wrong. The problems were specific to our need to change an existing document. If you know you are going to print via Blurb, it is far easier to download their excellent template and you are then assured success.

The bare facts of the sizes and uploads were as follows:

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1st Published 01/10/2009
last update 09/12/2022 14:50:50

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Using Adobe Creative Suite for Album Design - part 4 of 1 2 3 4 5 6 7