Photo Book Organization

When making a photo book, one of the first things to do is establish an organizational structure for your book. This helps when someone flips through the finished book and it also speeds up your workflow. It gives you a clear structure to help you select photos and to figure out where and how the photos fit into your book.

If you’re making an annual photo book, the structure is easy – you can organize it by month. For a vacation book, you can organize it by day or the events that happened during your vacation.

When it comes to making a cookbook, there are several options available for organization. It could be organized by the meal (breakfast, lunch, dinner), the ingredient, or the season to name a few. While it helps to have choices, often it makes the decision harder to make. And I don’t want you to get stuck so I’m starting a new design series tracking six cooksbooks I own that will help illustrate key design decisions.

In this blog post, I’m starting with the Table of Contents to help identify how other cookbooks have organized the recipes.

Cookbook Organization

With each of the cookbooks I’m sharing, I’m including the basic organization, the title & author, and a few examples of the sections. Use this as inspiration to look in your own cookbook collection and see how some of your favorites have organized the recipes.

Defining Your Cookbook Organization

So what is right for your cookbook?

Let’s walk through a few criteria to help you figure out how you want to organize your cookbook.

Gut Reaction.

Is there one type of organization that immediately stands out for you? Do you always love when you flip through a cook book with a certain organization? If so, start with that one.

Your next step is to list out sample sections and determine how well the recipes you want to include fits into those categories. If you are getting stuck – for example, don’t know how your recipes fit into these categories – go back and adjust your list. You may want to switch out the categories or organizational structure.

To illustrate this further, if you love cookbooks organized by Time of Day but realize you have few lunch recipes you want to include, switch the categories to something more like Food Type and see if that better fits your recipes.

Simplicity.

Making a cookbook is difficult and time consuming. There are a lot of steps that you’ll have to include. Testing and typing up the recipes. Making the food and photographing the finished product. Selecting and Editing the photos. Designing the layouts.

So you don’t want to overcomplicate the structure. While you may love the idea of organizing it by Emotion, you don’t want the structure to further complicate the process. You don’t want to spend too much time deciding on the right categories and how meals will fall into them.

For example, if you’ll spend hours trying to decide if your grandmother’s potato casserole should go into a Family Heirloom Recipes section or a Comfort Food section…select another organizational structure to avoid having to make those little decisions.

What’s Missing.

Another way to determine how to organize your cookbook is to ask yourself, what do you find missing from other cookbooks you have in your collection? You have a desire to make a family cookbook; ask yourself why. Your motivation is probably because something is missing from yuor existing cookbooks. Use this reason to structure your book.  

One example, you love all of your cookbooks but are missing a collection of your family receipes. This informs you to make a cookbook solely of family receipes. Maybe you want to organize it by family members who reminds of you particular dish.

My Cookbook.

For my cookbook, I’m following a combination of all three suggestions.

Gut Reaction + Simplicity:  Time of Day or Food Type is my initial preference for a simple organizational structure.

What’s Missing: For me, what’s missing from the cookbooks I own, is a collection of our standard go-to meals and how these favorites could be arranged in meal plan format. My goal is to organize our favorite meals into weekend meals that could lead into easy-to-prepare weekday meals.

For example, I want to connect how braised short ribs on Saturday could lead to short rib tacos on Monday night. This would also help link ingredients to different recipes. If I’m using dill for a weekend meal, what are other simple meals I could make over the next few days so I’m not wasting the ingredient.

This will take a little more planning upfront but will make my cookbook more useful and relevant for our family.

Now I’d love to hear from you. Have you seen a creative way structure a cookbook that wasn’t mentioned above?

Once you’ve set your photo book goal for the year, it’s time to start gathering inspiration to define the vision for your photo book. To help define your vision, you’ll want to look for layouts, covers, fonts, colors, and an overall tone for your book. 

There are several places I frequently turn to when I start my inspiration gathering for photo book projects. I’m sharing three of my favorite sources of inspiration with you plus an action step to get you started.

Pinterest is the first and most obvious place to go to for inspiration and to gather all of your favorite ideas in one place. 

Some of my favorite search terms for Pinterest when looking for photo book inspiration are:

• photo book or photo book design
• magazine layouts
• editorial design
• color palette
• font or font combinations

To gather your ideas in one place, I want you to create a specific pin board for each photo book project. If you have 2-3 ideas you’re working through, you need a pin board for each one (unless you want to have a similar vision for all of the books). This will help consolidate your vision for one photo book instead of having to sift through and remember the ideas you originally had for your book. 

This also means you can go through pins you’ve already collected on your standard boards and collect the ideas that relate to your current specific project.

Flipping through magazines is one of my favorite ways to feel inspired and more importantly motivated to get working on my photo book. Often when I go through magazines, it’s not about seeing a specific layout but more about seeing the design come together that makes me want to see my own photos come together on the page. 

Another way magazines inspire my photo book vision is to see how more avant garde design comes together. Now, I realize magazine design is not the most experimental form of editorial design. However, it is the most accessible form I come across on a daily basis. This helps push some of the design concepts and things I want to try. 

Two of my favorite magazines I go to for inspiration are Bon Appetit and Living. 

Finally, I love visiting websites to feel inspired by design principles. While the composition of the elements are slightly different in web versus printed form, I glean a lot of ideas from seeing how the various fonts, colors, and blocks of photos come together on websites. 

Here are a few items I pay attention to when visiting websites for inpsiration:

• What is the color palette and how are the colors used? 
• How are titles incorporated on the page? 
• What are the text style heirarchies established and how were they used? 
• Are there design elements that make design more interesting? 
• How does the organization help you move through the site? 
• What is the overall feeling you experience when visisting the website?
• What design elements contributed to that feeling? 

Now it’s your turn. Find your inspiration and gather them in a specific pin board on pinterest. This will collect all of your potential ideas and things that inspire you – all in one place. 

Now, it’s important to title your board with your specific book project idea. You don’t want to use this board for any and every photo book idea. 

Instead, you want to specifically gather ideas from pinterest, magazine and websites that speak directly to what you may want to use for your 2018 book project. 

In the end, you may not use everything, however, it’s important to have a good place to start from. So create your board today and find at least 10 ideas to pin to your board to get started.

Want to follow along with my board? Click here to sign up. 

Ah, it’s that time of year again. Time to look at the fresh new year with rejuvenated eyes and optimistic goals. As I’ve written before, goals are great to make but you need to make them specific and actionable in order to make your goal a reality.

Why are goals important? Because they establish something concrete for you to work toward. Otherwise, you aimlessly go through the year with only a vague idea of what you want.

Why do goals fail? Because often they aren’t tied to a specific plan of action and capitalizing on a relevant and pressing desire.

Now, I’m sharing some ways below on how I can help….but before we get there, I want to share my photo book goal.

It’s a goal that I’ve been eager to start for months but wanted to clear some current goals off my plate to make room for this one because it will take work, organization, thoughtful planning and some practice.

In 2018, I want to make a Family Cookbook.

It’s important to say right off that bat, I’m not a cook. I don’t regularly cook our family meals. My role up to this point has been primarily in charge of bread and breakfast. Which I admit, this isn’t nothing. However, it’s definitely fair to say I have my work cut out of me to cook all of the meals I want to go in our family cookbook.

And I’m not a food photographer. Probably because I don’t cook, I rarely photograph food. However, I’m photographing my kids less and less; so I’m looking for another subject matter to photograph. Similar to cooking, it will take learning and practice but I’m totally enthused by the idea.

As I set out to embark on this new photo book goal, I’ve noticed that there are four key reasons that will make this goal my focus throughout the year.

|1| Connect with your Passion.

Right now, I’m really excited about planning, preparing, attempting and photographing meals. I can’t fully explain where this is coming from. All I know, is that I’m energized by the thought of sorting through recipes, trying them out, and photographing them. But at this point, it doesn’t matter why. I’m embracing this desire and making sure it translates into a photography and photo book project.

|2| Fill in a gap.

For this point, it means that your photo book goal should fulfill something that is missing in your life that you really want or need. It could be an annual photo book from a previous year that you have yet to finish. Or a special vaction, to Disney perhaps, that will make a perfect photo book. For my particular goal this year, I’m looking to design a book to combine our favorite recipes from cookbooks and family recipes that I want to collect in one easy location. I also want to create a cookbook that works for our family; something that lays out our go-to recipes to help us save time.

Plus, after years of getting Living and Bon Appetit magazines, I’ve collected recipes in this box that I’m saving to try later. However, it’s to easy to forget which recipes I’ve placed here and when they would be appropriate. By taking on this project, I want to go through the recipes I’ve collected, try the ones that could really work for us and if it’s good, take photos and place it in our book. Then I can purge all of these magazine (and internet) clippings.

|3| Come up with a creative design.

My theory is if you are excited about the design possibilities, the more likely you are to want to work on your photo book. And cookbooks have a wide variety of options when it comes to including creative design elements. With cookbooks, there are ways to develop creative responses for the table of contents, the organization, the section pages, the text for the recipe, the photography, the page numbers, and any graphics. The design possibilities excite me. For your photo book goal, find a way, no matter how small, to inject a design element that will make you eager to see the final product.

|4| Create a family heirloom.

In the end, what really matters is that you are energized by creating a family heirloom. When you recognize the larger goal or purpose, this maintains the priority and focus of the goal. For my cookbook, I know that working on this cookbook at this time, will memorialize the recipes that mean a lot to our family and will be something interesting for our kids to have when they are older. This provides added motivation to keep me working on this photo book throughout the year.

Now that you know my goal, it’s time to define your goal. And I wanted to share 6 ways I’m here to help you achieve your goals this year.

FREE

If you’ve failed at sticking to your photo book goals in the past, you need this workshop to get started on the right foot and meet your goals.

UNDER $50

Every month you’ll receive a downloadable PDF Lesson (appr 20 pages) helping and inspiring you to complete an annual photo book this year.

ABOVE $50

Never find time to complete your family photo book? Let me design it for you! All you have to do is upload your photos and I’ll handle the rest.