Illustrations - Preparing the Images for your Book Design

Illustrations really can turn ‘text’ into interesting page designs. For DWG book designs we use a combination of photos (digital), map sections taken from our Tour & Trail Map designs, a specially designed ‘Summary Bar’ unique to DWG, along with coloured ‘headers’ for chapter headings and ‘footers’ for page numbering.
Have a look at a DWG Walk! guide book to see how simple illustrations combined with judicious use of ‘bold’ and ‘coloured’ text come together to produce ‘Good Book Design’.

Your illustrations can be in any form that you want but try to remember that ‘more colour’ means a bigger file size for your Instant-Books Edition.
As a very general guide to choosing illustrations here are the basic types:-

  • Black and White Line Drawings are best drawn in your DTP programme as a separate design complete with the text included in the design. This produces a much clearer image that conventional drawing and scanning to make an image file. B&W Line Drawings can be saved as a 2 bit B&W image, which is the smallest file size of any type of illustration. Particularly good for ‘technical manuals’, ‘teaching materials’, ‘Paper Plane’ books etc.
  • Grey Scale Pictures might sound a bit ‘old hat’ in this colour age but can bring ‘atmosphere’ to any subject where an historical aspect is required; e.g. old photos, historical images. Saved as 8 bit Grey scale images they are the most economical file sizes for ‘picture’ style illustrations.
  • Full Colour Illustrations, including digital photos, are usually saved as 24 bit RGB colour jpeg images, but if you want smaller file sizes for these illustrations you can convert the image into 8 bit Paletted colour jpegs, but you will lose some colour definition.

Some Do’s & Don’ts for your Illustrations

When preparing images for your illustrations try to consider the file size and the balance of Good Design you are trying to apply to each page of your book. Generally the PDF conversion of your finished book into an Instant-Books Edition will be carried out at a 300dpi resolution, so there is little (if any) point in having your images at a higher resolution.

Digital cameras are a great way of obtaining the photos for your illustrations; you can transfer the images direct to your computer, adjust/correct/manipulate these images in ‘Paint’ style programs, change their size and resolution etc etc. It is tempting to think more is better when thinking of the Megapixels available between different digital camera, but bear in mind all of our DWG digital images are taken on little Olympus 3X optical zoom pocket sized cameras with maximum resolutions of 2 and 3 Megapixels. At a 300dpi resolution in our book design our pictures only a camera resolution of 1 Megapixel.
Buying an expensive digital camera is no guarantee that you will have better photos for your book.

Next Author Advice - Book Design 4 Bringing your design together
See the full Author Advice Directory pdf file in Adobe Acrobat