Make Your Own Coffee Table Book – There are many wonderful coffee table books published every year that cover a wide range of styles, content, themes and approaches, as exemplified in this list of 41 of the best coffee table books selected by
But if you really want to make your coffee table book a completely unique expression of yourself, did you know you can design it and get it professionally printed just the way you want it? And why not? With the right knowledge and guidance, you can certainly create your very own high-quality coffee table book that goes the extra mile to impress.
Make Your Own Coffee Table Book
Stylish, decorative, interesting and evocative: a coffee table book can express your taste, values, personality and enhance your home. People love coffee table books and they are as popular now as ever. Whether to house and share your favorite memories, as a talking point for guests, or as an expressive accessory for your interior design concept, nothing beats a coffee table book. Nothing that is, except a custom made coffee table book.
The Monocle Book Of Homes
Coffee table books are often more of a visual than a textual medium. They are designed to look great in the home and to be browsed, looked at and enjoyed in a comfortable way, without the concentration and effort a scientific, historical, political or instructional book, or a novel or a collection of essays might require . So, think full-page color or black-and-white photography with short explanatory or descriptive text limited to a short paragraph on each two-page spread, for example.
Of course you can write more if writing is your thing. A coffee table book of your illustrated poetry can be a wonderful idea. Or a more detailed travelogue — accompanied by beautiful photography — recounting your travels in Europe, Africa, Asia, or your journey across the US from the east to the west coast. How about a cookbook of your favorite recipes? Perhaps a memoir of your childhood or a family history that traces your ancestry back to the 17th century? Your coffee table book can be about anything you want.
But something has to go! A random collection of images and words without a unifying theme will make designing your book nearly impossible and will only confuse and confuse anyone who picks it up. Think about what you want your book to be about. Armed with that idea, you will be ready to take the next steps: create or collect the content and put it all together through design.
Gweneth Oval Coffee Table, Walnut
If you are proficient with basic book design software such as InDesign, CorelDraw, Microsoft Publisher, or one of dozens of others — some free to download, others for a price — you may want to dive right into the layout and composition of your book. Or, if you have the time, you can start and teach yourself as you go. Otherwise, you’ll want to hire a professional, experienced designer to handle the layout of your book and prepare the files to get them ready to send to your printer.
Whichever route you choose, it’s always a good idea to call your printer early in the process and get them on board with the scope and goals of your custom coffee table book project. Not only will a reputable printer — that’s us, by the way! – can simplify your journey from concept to completion, but they will also provide detailed advice on what needs to be done, when and how; layouts, fonts, choosing paper stock, organizing your files for submission, printing methods, and more. We even have our own expert designers in-house. But while we wait for your call, let’s take a deeper dive into what is involved in creating your own beautiful, custom-made coffee table book.
The first thing a successful coffee table book needs to be is striking. After all, it is a book that is meant to be seen. Think of it as a presentation book, if you will. So, it should exude quality even at first glance: high-quality glossy paper that pops with beautiful images, a robust and artistic cover and dust jacket, and special finishes such as color-threaded headbands and footbands, and a silk placeholder ribbon.
Make Your Own Coffee Table Book Collection
It should also be big. But be careful here: it should be big enough to suggest importance, but not so big that it’s awkward to handle. Popular dimensions for coffee table books are anything from an 8-inch square — which is on the smaller side and might need to be presented at the top of an artistically arranged pyramid of larger books — to a whopping 11.24 by 14.25 inches to really to impress and dominate the space. Anything bigger than that — except when starting to transition from impressive to bombastic — will be too big to browse with ease.
How long is a piece of string? There are no hard and fast rules to regulate the length of a coffee table book. But as a rule of thumb, anything less than 30 to 50 pages can look a bit thin and anything over 300 or so will start to weigh like a 19th century family Bible — and you might have to get your coffee table reinforced with steel beams to hold it! 50 to 100 pages can be a good average as a benchmark. But it all depends on the overall size of the book and what it is about. Let us know your concept for the content, and we’ll be happy to advise you on the most suitable page count for your book.
Whether you do the design yourself at home or outsource this potentially complex task to a professional designer — or your tech-savvy great-nephew! — once you’ve written your text, chosen your photos and illustrations, and decided on the order they’ll be in, it’s time to create a digital ‘mock-up’ of your book.
Doxa Coffee Table Dark Walnut Finish Black Frame
But you don’t need to generate a ‘proof’ of the entire bundle at this stage. Focus on the cover — which will include the front, spine, and back — one sample of a single page, and one example of a double-page spread.
The great thing about digital design software is that you can generate multiple versions very quickly without wasting resources. So feel free to be creative, experiment, try every option and have fun. Once you have a handful or more designs that look good to you, narrow them down to a shortlist of two or three and test them on people whose opinion you trust.
Friends and family can be a good place to start, post on your social media for feedback, or ask your interior designer for their perspective. But in the end — while you have to take the reactions of others into account — it’s your book and it’s your call. Go with the design you prefer.
Creative, Cheap, And Easy Wood Pallet Projects
Whatever design you end up choosing, make sure you avoid a layout that repeats without variation. Experiment with full page images on the left or right opposite a mostly white page with the text placed in the middle, top or bottom left or right. Try a double page photo with the text in white on a darker area. Try different options. Check out the best coffee table books you can find to get ideas and inspiration. But always make sure there is variation within the layout — where things are placed — while maintaining a consistent style — the fonts and color schemes used, for example.
Once you are happy, you can complete the layout of the entire book. So, along with all the necessary written instructions, you can send to the printer together with the individual files. Just so you know, most printing companies don’t check your files — they just print them. But we really care about your project and we go the extra mile. We will manually check all your files and suggest any useful amendments or corrections before going to print. And we’ll send you a full digital ‘proof’ copy before you give us the start to load the paper, turn on the machines and get the ink flowing.
If you work with your own designer or one of us, you are covered, as they prepare print-ready files for you. But if you — or a family member or friend — are doing this at home, we have a few handy reminders to make sure you’re sending files that are truly print-ready.
Diy Home Decor Ideas
Your book will be printed on paper and bound in a hard case. So, to create a truly beautiful object that is not only enchanting to the eye, but touching to touch, sighing with the satisfaction of its own excellence, the choices of paper and cover that you make matter.
Oh, but there are so many options once you start looking! A lot will depend on what the book is about, the image you want it to convey, the message you want it to communicate. Also the content and the size. The weight of the paper, the color, the finish — like gloss… or matte… or something else — and more must decide everything.
So, when we get to this point, we’ll walk you through and we’ll happily send you free samples of the papers we think will work best for your project — actual physical samples through the mail. You can see them, feel them, smell them. Then you know exactly what you have chosen