Picturia Press - Creating Books authored by you -->

Picturia Press recently designed "A Retrospective of Fine Art Oil Paintings" for a Bay Area artist, Iona Ezaki. The book is a collection of Landscapes, Animals, Still Life and Portraits done by Iona over the last 20 years.

Iona Ezaki was recently named 2009 Cupertino's Distinguished Artist of the Year. Iona has won numerous awards in the San Francisco Bay Area, including the Los Gatos Art Association and The Cupertino Fine Arts League. She was awarded the Outstanding Achievement in Landscape painting at the Cupertino Fall Fest in 2008 for her painting, "Napa Dreams". For more information about Iona and her artwork, visit: http://www.ionaspaintings.com.

To view more of this book, click here.

Think your book has what it takes to win $3,000? The Best Blurb® Books Contest is now accepting submissions! Let Picturia Press help you design the winning entry.

Enter your book by October 22 in one of three categories: family, pets, or travel, for a chance at one of three $3,000 grand prizes or one of three $1,000 runner-up prizes.

On October 23, voting is open to the public – tell your friends, family, neighbors, and Twitter followers to get out the vote. One judge in each category will select a winner and a runner-up from among the best Blurb books as voted on by the community.

So let's get started on your next book.

Live Journal is a well-known online blogging community that has been around since 1999. Recently, Picturia Press was hired to work with the team at Live Journal in compiling a selection of the best journal entries from their virtual online community.

The book was to be 10 year anthology for LiveJournal. It was very challenging to create a 118-page book; assuring that each writer and blog entry had it's own personality, while still complimenting the entire look and feel of the book. We hope the anthology will be a big success for LiveJournal and we congratulate them on their 10 year anniversary.

To view more of the book, click here.

We were happy to work with an prior client on creating a wedding book for her son, Matt, who recently got married. Our last project with this client was her Blurb best-selling cookbook.

Last year, her son got married in their home with just family and a few friends present. Although they didn't have a large wedding, they still wanted to have a keepsake of their special day. As a gift to the newlyweds, our client had all the photographs collected and asked us to create the wedding book as a surprise gift to her son and daughter-in-law.

Needless to say, they were completely surprised and delighted, and we were honored and pleased to be part of this special event. Congratulations again to Matt and Julie! To view more of this book, click here.

This was an absolutely amazing project to work on for one of our clients based in London. She is getting married in August and wanted to create a book - one book - to give her fiance as a wedding present. They met four years ago, like to travel and are known for taking a lot of pictures. She had OVER 1000 images for us to review and use for this project. This project originally started out as one book with 100 pages, but by the time we finished the project, we had four books. But, undeniably - four...beautiful books.


We even ended up being invited to the wedding! Unfortunately, we can't make it, but we are confident that there will definitely be a at least one picture taken of him receiving the books, and of course, we hope to work with them again on creating a WEDDING book after they get back from their honeymoon. We want to wish the very best to Hannah and Paul, a wonderful couple and a wonderful client.

We just finished a wonderful book for a Dr. Judith Monteferrante, a fine art photographer based in Gloucester, Massachusetts. Judith is a retired cardiologist with a special interest in female heart and cardiac imaging. This book, THE NUDE MATURED, explores the hidden beauty of aging and the soft sophistication of the beautiful older woman, accepting and often celebrating her desirability in this image–driven age of unachievable perfection.

The images were beautiful and mostly consisted of black and white photography. We were honored to work with Judith and her images during the creation of this book. We wish her continued success in her career.

At Picturia Press, we offer our clients a range of services depending upon their needs. While some clients hire us to design and layout their book for them, other clients simply require a book cover designed. We also provide what we call "enhancement consultations". This service is offered to clients who have designed their own books, yet feel they need some design help improving the look and feel. This includes creating unique layouts, photo retouching and color correction, typography, color selection and consistency. Please contact us for more information about these services.

Last week, we had a client in Australia contact us who was creating a book for his father's 60th birthday. He had created most of the book himself and done a great job, but wanted our opinion and assistance on designing the book to make it look more polished.

We were happy to work with him on making the layout more cohesive and consistent, including incorporating new page layouts, color selection and typography. Additionally, we designed the dust jacket for his book. Too bad we can't be in Australia when his father opens his present.

As a preferred vendor at Blurb, we are thrilled to learn about their newest product offering, the 12" x 12" Square Book. This will be a wonderful addition to their current line up of book sizes.

A client contacted us the other day because she was working on creating a great book chronicling the life of her friend who was turning 30 years old in a few weeks. Although she wanted to design the book herself, she asked us to consult with her on design and layout and the concepts of "telling the story" of her friend's life. We were very happy to assist her in creating a wonderful gift.

While we consulting with our client, we also provided our image correction services to work on red-eye elimination and color correction of some old photographs. We also designed the dust jacket for her new book, seen here.

There's nothing more rewarding than working with and recovering old photographs for a client. We were asked to do this project as a commemorative piece on our client's wife who recently passed away.

We received many scans, emails, and discs full of wonderful old images to work with on creating this book. We spent a great deal of time photo editing and photo retouching the images to bring them up to print quality.

Never assume a photo can't be used in your book because it is old, damaged and/or deteriorating. A good designer will know how to edit and recover those images to use in your book. Below is an example of one such image that we recovered and used in this book.



To view more of the book, please click here.

We just finished up publishing a photographer's book of images that he captured during his travels around the world. Primarily in Latin America, the UK and the Phillipines.

Picturia Press combined the photographer's images with wonderful quotes and sayings that would compliment the look and feel of the book without distracting the viewer from the photography.

To view more of the book, please click here.

Sound interesting? Whether it's for a school, a sports team or a club....Blurb.com has new special running right now and is offering a great service to help get your book designed with no up-front expense or budget.

Here's what you'll get:

• 8"x 10" 40 page book (additional pages is negotiable)
• one soft copy proof book (to review before final order)
• 8 hours of design time (includes internal pages and cover)

Offer good through June 30
Minimum of 30 book purchasers lined up
Price of each book: $29.95 softcover, $41.95 hardcover

Please contact Picturia Press for more information.

I have a very close friend of mine who recently celebrated her birthday. As I gift to her, I made a little "celebration" book reminding her of why she is so special to so many people, friends and family alike. These kinds of gifts are the best, because they come from the heart and it's a gift that people will keep forever.

We used lots of fun colors and images and typography to make this little book fun and memorable. Everyone who attended the event loved it - especially everyone who "appeared" in the book.

If you are trying to imagine something special to give to someone for an upcoming event, consider creating and gifting a Memory Book.

To see inside the book, click here.

Picturia Press was honored today by being selected as the first ever BlurbNation "Featured Member".

"Suzzanne of Picturia Press has done a phenomenal job developing her book design business for books for a wide range of clients who regularly return with repeat business. Also, a special shout out and thank you for Suzzanne's support of BlurbNation, which included flying cross country to co-host a BlurbNation meetup and submitting a detailed article on initial client discussions."

Picturia Press has worked with several "print on demand" companies, but has found Blurb to be exceptional in its' customer service, support, quality, options and pricing. We feel very fortunate to work with them and I am personally very appreciative of their continued support of our work.

Wedding albums can be the most rewarding projects to work on for book designers. Getting started is always the hardest part, simply because the bride has hundreds of images and sometimes over a thousand. It can be difficult and time consuming to choose which pictures to use in the book. Simply going through those images can be an overwhelming process for the couple. This is where a designer can be helpful. We ask the client to select the absolute "must haves" for the album first and then we will review the rest of the images to complete the book.

In this process, there's a lot of trust that needs to be established between the client and the designer. This isn't just a photo book or coffee table album - this is something that will last a lifetime and become a precious keepsake. As a designer, we want to have as much invested in the outcome of the final book as the client.

To view the book, click here.

We just finished working with Bob Barancik on his latest book of artwork: Art Not Hate, Creative Responses to Conflict. This book features a powerful selection of Bob's mixed media paintings.

We've worked with Bob Barancik on a number of projects and hope to continue to work with him on creating more of his books in the future. For more information regarding the Art Not Hate project, please visit: http://www.artnothate.com

Picturia Press has worked with Jerry Gotkin over the last year to design and create five books showcasing the artwork of Marjorie and Jerry Gotkin. Orchids: An Intimate Portrait of Beauty, Marjorie's Table, Still Life/Florals, The Tall Ships and The Gardens of Hospice by the Sea.

After designing these wonderful books, Jerry asked if we could create a website for him, which we created and just launched today and you can visit here: www.gotkinarts.com. As always, we were very happy to work with Jerry again on this project and to help showcase his beautiful art in both print and on the web.