I’d like to introduce you to our very own Ishantha L., Shutterfly’s Senior Director of User Experience. In his spare time, Ishantha is an accomplished abstract painter who utilizes Shutterfly photo books to help him tell the story behind his art. Here, Ishantha shares his journey through the photo book making process - from establishing his story goals and gathering his materials, to putting it all together with our easy-to-follow photo book making process.

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My name is Ishantha and I head up User Experience for the site and Product Management for Share at Shutterfly. I am also an abstract painter in my “spare” time. People always ask me about my art, what inspires me and a myriad other questions that most artists prefer to dodge.  As I was driving home one day, it occurred to me that a professional looking Photobook would be a great way to tell the story behind my art. Something I could hand out at exhibitions or share online in the Shutterfly Gallery (which I did).

Since I posted the book in the Gallery, I am deeply moved and thankful for all the wonderful comments I have received so far. I am getting more credit than I truly deserve, so I am going to share with you a simple palette of tricks on how I created the book. Yes, it is 100 pages long and people in the blogs say it has a professional look, but it was actually super easy to create.

Here’s a link to browse my art book in the Shutterfly Gallery. Check it out and I’ll take you through the process I went through.

1 | essence

Before I got to the fun part of designing the book, I took a moment to reflect what the essence of my story was all about. I think this is really important as it helps re-enforce a key theme throughout the book. My story was about my love for art and how my painting style evolved towards abstraction. I love modern art. As such, I wanted the entire design of the book to have a contemporary style. I found this became a guiding principle as I designed the book – the layouts, the fonts, the backgrounds, the cover, the back, the spine.

 
2 | gather

The next step was to gather my artifacts – the pictures and text that got strung together to tell the story. Most of the pictures were of my paintings over the years. I planned to place them in the book in chronological order. As you know, there are many ways to organize your pictures – you may want to think about chronological order which is a natural way to tell your story. Once I uploaded all my pictures, I simply sorted them in chronological order and put them in the filmstrip in the photobook creation path. Most of the text was written in word, which I later cut and paste into the text boxes in each page of the book.

3 | create

Now for the fun part. Creating my book was much easier than it looks. I wanted the book to have a contemporary, clean and minimalistic look. I was also time constrained. So I came up with the idea of creating just 2-3 page templates that looked great and then replicating these sets of pages across the book. The really cool feature “Apply selected to all pages” (link on the bottom left of the navigation bar) helped apply the layout I liked to each page. This way I did not have to take the time to design each page as I went along.

Here are a few other design decisions I made upfront that speeded up the process considerably:

Simplicity – I decided to put a single picture of my art on the pages on right and a text describing the art on the left. This made it really easy to drag and drop the pictures that were already arranged in chronological order to each page on the right.

 
Framework – The corresponding page on the left described the painting. The description for each painting followed the same framework (title of painting, size, year it was painted and medium). This framework helped me to fill in the blanks for each page on the left. This also helped the reader to simply thumb through the pages and get a feel for the progression in my style – the main theme behind my story.

Accents – I wanted the book design to be minimalistic and elegant. I love typography and so I played with different font sizes till I got some interesting visual effects.  To be honest, it is quite subtle but I really liked the little details I could do, such as the bold large font for the number of each painting (see above left).  To create fonts that were different in size, I used two adjacent text boxes instead of putting it all in one. So, the number 9 in the picture above is in a separate text box from the text below it. This is also the same trick that helped me build a table of contents as shown below. The orange lines do not show up in the design, but are shown here to illustrate the boundary of each text box.

 
Negative space – In the step where you select the Style for the book, I picked “Classic White” which worked perfectly for my story. I intentionally did not fill out a lot of text boxes to create more white space. I found the white (negative) space to be a valuable technique in creating a modern look and feel.

 
Variety – I added a couple more templates for variety and visual interest throughout the book. Simply, changing the size of the picture helped break the pattern and add some variety. However, as you see from the image below most of the pages have the same two page template, which really made it a breeze to create my book.

Fun – Finally, creating anything is all about the fun you are going to have along the way. I had lots of fun making and sharing this book. I hope this inspires you and I can’t wait to see where your creativity and storytelling takes you. Have Fun!