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design :: books

Now that the children are adults, my wife Colleen has taken up proofreading and copy editing as a small business called »WordWyze. That quickly expanded into the full process of assisting authors in getting their books from manuscript to physically published.

For introducing the books we needed "3D" covers long before the actual book is uploaded to the printers and weeks before any physical copies exist. So I found some free book template images and wrote a bash script that uses the imagemagick suite to assemble the front cover image and the templates - for both thicker and thinner books. Some examples:

[book] [book] [book] [book] [book] [book] [book] [book] [book]

Sometimes I get involved with designing the covers for some of the books. In the ones shown here, I was more involved, with others I just advise and guide. The design can can vary from using supplied artwork, to taking photos of artifacts, scanning photos, slides or documents, and finding fonts as with A Kiwi in Pang. I always look forward to getting roped into the next project.

Pixel Perfect

One of the often called upon details is getting image files ready for professional printing - like book covers, CD booklets and artwork. These must be pixel-perfect and include the bleed required by the printing house - usually 3mm. But one needs to prepare the work in pixels not millimeters and then keep in mind that printing is all standardised on 300dpi (sometimes even 600dpi - adjust accordingly) …dpi: dots per inch.

So to preserve some sanity, one has to convert units of measure, with good precision. For example, a book is going to be 127mm wide by 186mm tall with a 12.4mm spine. That is a typical specification you would get from a printing house quote, the 127x186mm being called "trim size". Some might send a template with it all marked out and the dimensions in millimeters (and sometimes inches), plus the bleed zones along the outside.

The width of the front cover and back cover will be 127mm plus one bleed of 3mm, so 130mm. There are 25.4mm to 1 inch, and then we have 300 pixels (dots) per inch. Therefore: 130 ÷ 25.4 × 300 = 1535.433 which can be rounded to 1535 pixels.

Similarly now the height is calculated as the 186mm plus two bleeds (top and bottom) giving 192mm. As before, we convert to pixels with simple maths: 192 ÷ 25.4 × 300 = 2267.717 which rounds to 2268 pixels.

Finally we add in the spine. 12.4 ÷ 25.4 × 300 = 146.457 which rounds to 146 pixels. The full width then will be the back cover, the spine, and the front cover: 1535 + 146 + 1535 = 3216 pixels.

Now you can prepare the cover image accordingly, and ensure you save it with a printing resolution of 300dpi.