Making a Recipe Book

Prior to the holiday season, it came to our attention that our biggest fan wanted to try some of our recipes, but would prefer to cook from them in print form. Rather than simply print them out, we decided it would be a great gift idea to design a recipe book incorporating all of our favorite recipes from the year. Here's what we did!

Lay out pages
We chose to do the design in PowerPoint because it's familiar to us and easy to use for laying out pages. Starting from scratch, we had a lot of design choices to make, including page format, fonts, colors, backgrounds, and photo placement. The blog can get a bit wordy, so we had to cut down and clean up the text to fit in the allotted spaces. Based on the specifications from the publisher, we also had to set the pages to a specific size which included bleed and margins.

Editing the pizza casserole page in PowerPoint

Upload to publishing website and order books
We found Viovio to have an easy publishing process and reasonable prices. We exported the pages from PowerPoint as 300 dpi (dots per inch) png (an image format) files, zipped them into one big file, and uploaded them. The website then holds your hand through the rest of the process as you choose your book type (size, hard vs. soft cover, paper type) and cover design, and shows a nice preview of the completed book.

We ordered 9"x7" softcover books, and they arrived exactly as we had designed them.

The cover

Some recipes from the seafood section facing a full-page photo

It took a lot of time between us to finish it, but it was a fun project and perhaps we'll make another book for 2011!