Church Anniversary Book Finished!!! :D

Some layouts and art elements I made at the very beginning in the brainstorming stage (they look too dark for the occasion, or too bright for the elderly to read the text).

Some screenshots of the work-in-progress layouts. Peaceful, calm, feel like home, comfortable, simple, clean...these are the keywords I have in mind when I was designing the layout, so I used a neutral/muted palette:

And I accidentally noticed one extremely beautiful thing in InDesign...

...the missing font highlight color!!! The color look soooooo pretty and it was a love at first sight!! At first, I didn't know the highlighted part means the font is missing there, and I tried to use the eye-dropper to sample the color (silly me). Well, but it's really very pretty, so I tried to google what color that is but in vain (sigh). I then tried to match that color myself and used that in the book :p Apparently, it's hard to make that same color with CMYK :p

Final Book Cover:

A more lively cover with a wheat field, symbolizing hope and the plentiful harvest mentioned in the Bible. It also matches with the wheat field in the website :) I tried to keep the layout clean.

Due to privacy issues, I can't share more of the inside here, but I'm glad that, with God's grace, I was able to finally put them all together and finished the 52-page book in a week!

Random Stuff

:p Did some random fun stuff while designing the anniversary book:

3-in-1 God

30th Anniversary Book for Church

So I'm almost done with the website (that's actually last week's news :p)! After spending a lot of time fine tuning a lot of things on the layout that people might not even notice, I'm finally moving on to the 30th Anniversary Book for the church.

(A little more on the fine-tuning, I learned that there are actually a lot of Nivo Sliders out there, so I finally understand why the tech support of Unite Nivo Slider told me the one I have in the template is not their Nivo Slider...:p Also, I found that I can add shadow to objects in the CSS file!!! I didn't know that kind of thing even existed :D <--- such a newbie. The code of box shadow I used:

box-shadow: 0px 1px 5px 0px #4A4A4A;

Notice the tiny little shadow around the box:

I also found that I can load a module within an article! It's like a miracle to me! This link shows you exactly how to do that!)

Back to the topic :p Before working on anything, we had to figure out the size of the book and contact the printing company for a quote. Because we are not printing a large quantity, with a limited budget, it's a little difficult to achieve the outcome I have in mind. What I wanted to do is to have perfect binding for the books, with a landscape or square layout (though it's kind of a waste of paper :p...but it looks so much better...).

After negotiating with the size, binding and pricing for a whole week, we seem to not have reached any conclusion. HOWEVER, we need the book published on/before Nov 23! And I still haven't worked on the layout yet because of the size still not determined! :( I really think that I wasted a lot of time this week, in which the time could be used to work on something more productive, like working on my stock illustrations :( Sorry, Tim :(