Too often I find myself completely forgetting about moments and travels and memories because the photos are all buried away in some nondescript folder in some other nondescript folder on my external back-up hard drive. I often wish for the days where we still printed out our photos all the time--it's so much easier to just pull down a photo album from my bookshelf while I'm randomly walking by and flip through old times than to plug in my hard drive and go searching through folders to find photos and their respective catalogs to browse. After my recent Italy trip, I decided that I didn't want to have everything hidden away, encrypted onto some spinning disc anymore. Instead, I wanted to be able to hold the memories of our trip in my hands whenever I wanted to and slowly browse, flipping the pages over one by one, to relive the sights we saw and the experiences we had. So I made a book from the photographs that I and my travel companions made (with everything from my big camera to our phones). And I can't tell you how wonderful it is to have this printed travelogue (beautifully printed by Blurb) in my hands. The whole aesthetic experience of pages, paper, hardbound covers, ink on a page, matte gloss over the photos--I wish we had more of this in our all-too-digital lives these days, which is why sated magazine is going to be a print publication.
But, since I can't have all of you over for a cup of tea and an Italy book-viewing experience, here are some of my favorite spreads in the book, for digital viewing. In addition to part of the photography (there are also photographs in here from my friends who were in Italy with me), I also designed the whole thing from scratch, which was quite the undertaking for a non-designer like myself, but I'm quite excited by and proud of the results!
[click on photo below to enter a full-screen view]
much, much more after the jump....
[Edit: For the curious who have asked, I used Adobe InDesign with the Blurb plug-in to design the book, and it's the Standard Portrait option on Blurb.]