Using BLURB.com to publish “How To Design a Logo”

As the result of a final project for my Print Productions course, I have recently published a book entitled “How to Design A Logo” with a team of 2 other designers. Although I also created many of the pictures in the book and the overall look and feel of the book, my most important role was to prepare the book to be printed using Blurb.com.

As a freelance designer, I have prepared many projects for print such as event flyers, tickets, menus, and most popularly business cards, but none of these processes compare to the process of preparing a graphic book for print!

Although Blurb.com is an online service for book publishing, I think that the site makes it fairly easy for artists as well as people of other disciplines to publish their own book. What I enjoyed most about the service was that the site gives you many options from how to build your book to what your book can look like, allows you to print and ship one book, and it’s fairly inexpensive.

As a designer, I chose to do all of the design work myself (even though they have many pre-designed layouts for clients to use), and because of my decision to build the book from scratch, I had to check for errors over a zillion times. Though it was an extremely frustrating process to organize the books content, Blurb’s “pre flight” software was very helpful in notifying me of possible errors before I sent the book to print.

Although I have not received the physical copy of the book yet, For someone who has never prepared a book for print prior to this assignment,I am optimistic that it will come out ok because of Blurb’s easy to use service. Outside of the sites vague instructions on how to use outside software to design the book,if anyone asked, I’d recommend Blurb.com to first time publishers.