‘My Childhood’ Book Design & Photo Restoration
When my grandma asked me for help formatting a Word document, I was happy to help! What she sent to me was a series of vignettes from her childhood, dozens of pages, that she had written down as a gift to her children, and I immediately knew that we needed to do something more than print out a Word document to do them justice.
I offered to format her stories into a proper book, bound and featuring old family photos. I told her she could say no; I’d already formatted the original document and sent it back to her. But she was excited by the idea and immediately began pulling photos out of storage for me.
She wanted to send them out as Christmas presents, so I had a grand total of five days to design the book front-to-back, which included a large amount of photo restoration.
Inspiration
For the cover and title page designs, I was inspired by 1940s era children’s books, specifically the Little Grey Rabbit books. My grandma was born in the 40s and it felt fitting that a collection of her memories about growing up should pull from the design of popular children’s books from that same era.
My grandmother is an artist, so I suggested we use one of her own paintings for the cover. I laid out all 63 pages of her writing, incorporating photos wherever they were relevant, and collaged them onto the back cover.
Photo Retouching
A large number of the photos my grandma sent me were heavily damaged, and since she didn’t have a scanner she was only able to send me pictures she took with her iPad, which meant bowed and inconsistently lit photos.
