Our Macaron Coffee Table Book!
photos by Jared Smith
As most of you all know by now, I’m quite the lover of macarons… and coloring on them. I know, I know, it’s all very adult and professional, but hey, the heart wants what it wants, right? Out of all of the glossary of macs projects and DIY’s I’ve done over the last four years, I’ve never actually sat down and put together a compilation of some of my favorites until now, with our macaron coffee table book!
We made the book through Blurb, and I originally thought it would just be cool to have as a keepsake since we never create tangible versions of the blog photos, but I’m kind of loving the idea of making it available to you all to purchase if you’d like! What do you think, would you all be interested if we offered a macaron book?!
I had no idea that that you could even design and sell your own book until we started creating it with their desktop designer, but you can actually sell your creations either through Blurb, Amazon, Apple Books, or in retailers (clearly we are not that cool yet), which is kind of crazy awesome! I don’t know that we’re skilled enough designers to sell a book in retailers all on our own, but a coffee table book I can do. I also think they’d be perfect for portfolios, family heirloom gifts, etc, so I’m going to share my quick thoughts/tips on what we did wrong, or plan to do differently so you have a heads up!…
I knew I wanted to have a mix of designed pages, styled photos, and tutorials for each project, but that would mean a mixture of choosing our favorite images and designing the layout for the remaining elements to upload into the Blurb designer.
The first mistake we made was saving the text pages as .JPG and uploading them as images. If you’re looking superrrr closely, it’s not has high quality as just a regular book text page. We should’ve saved them as higher quality .PDF’s or something similar to keep the quality there after printing.
This next go around with printing, I’m also going to change the paper to ProLine Uncoated paper. I wanted it to be sleek, matte sheets but we just got the standard matte, and I wish we would’ve gone the extra mile with the ProLine. In hindsight I would have just order the swatch kit, first!
I also plan to do a hardcover matte binding instead of the softcover, too. I really, really love softcover books, but I’m not the biggest fan of the matte finish, and the hardcover matte makes the final product much more elevated in my opinion.
Have you all ever considered creating your own book for work/portfolio use/family memories? I really loved the ease and level of customization we had with Blurb, but I’ve definitely still got some tweaking to do if we’re going to sell a version like this.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on what you’d like to see in our macaron book, too! Would you want additional projects not on the blog, extra tips and tricks? Let us hear it!
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