Friday, May 4, 2012

TGIF: Italy memories to hold in my hand



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.]

22 comments:

  1. Your pictures are beautiful!

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  2. You did such a great job with it! 
    What program did you use to add the writing? Only the options Blurb offers, or something else?

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  3. I live in Rome and it was nice to see how you took pictures of my city. Lovely photos! (ad sorry for my english) ;)

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  4. Gorgeous photos! What a wonderful record of your trip :-)

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  5. So lovely, as always, Steph! Love your style!

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  6. Breathtaking pictures!  You've inspired me to make a similar tangible collection of photos from a recent trip to Turkey. Would love to know which Blurb book template you used (standard portrait?) and how you added the script-style writing. Thank you, as always, for the inspiration!

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  7. Thank you so much, Kristen! :D

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  8. yay, I am all for tangible photo collections. I used the standard portrait size but designed the whole book using Adobe InDesign rather than one of blurb's own templates because I wanted more creative control.

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  9. Adobe InDesign.

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  10. Magnificent! Such "Eye Candy" and so inspirational!! 

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  11. Omg I know that cat at Fornillo, those ducks are at home on the main beach in Positano and bring their ducklings to feed too. You were practically behind our house in the alley way and that is 'Pepito' Simone's fishing boat in the water. I recognize each and every step you took. As well as that creepy holy picture from the shop in the alley in Sorrento. Did you wonder why no one picks the oranges on the streets of  Via degli Aranci? It's because they are really bitter! Thank you for taking me home with your beautiful pictures :)

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  12.  Just emailed the folks at blurb to point them to your beautiful book!  thought you would be perfect for their "examples" page :)

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  13. aw, that's so nice of you, thanks! ^^

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  14. Omg love this. So beautifully designed. I made a blurb book from my China trip back in the day, and am totally re-inspired to do something like this in the future... maybe for Paris. :))) 

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  15. You're an amazing photographer

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  16. Rosa-- that is amazing that you recognize all of these details, down to the fishing boat!

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  17. ahhhhh--Paris! Take me with you?

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  18. p.s. I dream of doing a trip to Paris with black and white film only.

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  19. I've been lamenting the gigabytes of beautiful memories still stuck on my harddrive -- thank you for the nudge to organize and print them into something solid!

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  20. The last photos are completely breath-taking! <3

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  21. Great blog and great photos! Which photo camera do you use? 

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I love hearing from you and reading your comments! Thanks so much for stopping by the blog. Happy feasting!