Book Design Made Simple

You can do it yourself.

  • HOME
  • ABOUT
  • BOOK
  • VIDEOS
  • BLOG
  • MEDIA
    • About the book
    • Resources
  • SHOP
You are here: Home / Archives for color

Color


Color for book designBelow you'll find links to all the information about color that’s available on our website, book, videos, and blog.

We gained a lot of experience from creating Book Design Made Simple. You can learn from our successes and avoid our pitfalls! We’ve written blog posts about devising a color palette and mixing two colors in InDesign, as well as created video tutorials about using color in InDesign.

 

Excerpts from Book Design Made Simple

  • Color gradients: tips for best results
  • InDesign layers: how to use them with text and shapes

 

Blog posts

Below are all the blog posts tagged with Color, starting with the most recent post.

Design a children’s picture book

March 9, 2020 By Fiona Raven 37 Comments

Group of children's picture books.Children’s picture books are fun to design! They’re colorful, full of images, and everything is packed into a small number of words and pages.

To design a children’s picture book, you’ll need to consider lots of factors: book size, page count, quality of images, flow of text, color, and more. Let’s take a look at those factors. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Book Design Tagged With: color, images, typesetting

Design a coffee table book

November 11, 2019 By Glenna Collett 15 Comments

coffee table books on a coffee tableCoffee table books. Are they a blast from the past? No, actually, folks are still publishing them, and you can, too. Do you have an idea for a coffee table book of poetry and photography? About a specific artist or a place you love? About your local history, or something completely different? With good planning and design, your book could become very successful. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Book Page Design Tagged With: book marketing, book printing, color, images, text frames

Working with a book illustrator

June 11, 2018 By Fiona Raven 17 Comments

Image of a book tree by a book illustrator.Will you work with a book illustrator for your book cover and/or pages? If so, you probably have lots of questions! Where can you find a suitable book illustrator? How much should you expect one or more illustrations to cost? Will you own the copyright of the illustrations used in your book? What size, resolution, and format should the digital files be?

Here are answers to all those questions and more. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Publishing Tagged With: color, images, Photoshop

Reference books for book designers

December 4, 2017 By Fiona Raven 9 Comments

Reference books about book designAsk any book designer about their collection of reference books and you’ll get a long list of the usual suspects: books about design, typography, layout, and grids; dictionaries and style guides; software manuals; and lots of books and magazines kept for inspiration. But which books are indispensable to a book designer?

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Book Cover Design Tagged With: color, typesetting

Converting multiple images to CMYK in Photoshop

September 11, 2017 By Fiona Raven 12 Comments

Convert to CMYK in Photoshop using batch processingNeed to convert to CMYK in Photoshop? Let’s say you’re designing and typesetting a book with lots of images. You’ve finished laying out all the pages, and your last task is to prepare the images for print. All of your images have either been scanned or photographed, and therefore they are all RGB color (not CMYK color, as required by most offset printers). And most images are JPGs, although you might have a few PNGs too.

It’s a monumental task to convert each image to CMYK individually. Suppose you have 50+ images, or even 1,500+ images! I found myself in this situation recently, and am sharing with you a quick and easy way to convert all of your images to CMYK at once by batch processing actions in Photoshop. (It sounds complicated, but isn’t.) [Read more…]

Filed Under: Book Page Design Tagged With: color, images, Photoshop

Mixing colors for 2-color printing in InDesign and Photoshop

July 10, 2017 By Glenna Collett 15 Comments

two colors mixed in a patchwork design for 2-color printing

In my previous blog post, I mentioned mixing two colors to use for 2-color printing. So now I’m back to explain how to do that in InDesign, plus how to make a 2-color photo (duotone) in Photoshop. And I’ll let you in on the simple way to make a fake duotone right in InDesign, too.

So let’s start with what we can do in InDesign. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Book Page Design Tagged With: book printing, color, Photoshop

Devising a color palette for your book

June 12, 2017 By Glenna Collett 3 Comments

Pantone colors for devising a color paletteDo you have a favorite color?

If you’re a designer, I hope your answer is no. Every color can look good or bad, and be valuable or useless, depending on where and how it is used.

In this blog post we’ll help you find colors for your next book project. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Book Page Design Tagged With: color

Designing a book series

April 11, 2017 By Fiona Raven 4 Comments

Bawbs Raven Feathers, boxed set, by Robert ChomanyAre you designing a book cover that’ll become part of a series or boxed set? If so, you’ll need to think ahead! There are a few design considerations to take into account when you plan your book cover design. Not only should your cover design be successful using different title lengths and images, but more importantly, it must create a look or brand that’ll easily identify all future books as being part of the same series. Sound challenging? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered! [Read more…]

Filed Under: Book Cover Design Tagged With: book marketing, color

Making tables look good in InDesign

September 14, 2016 By Fiona Raven Leave a Comment

Add color to a table in InDesign.You’ve imported your table or spreadsheet from Word or Excel into InDesign, and made a few adjustments to the text and columns following our previous blog post, Want to import from Excel into InDesign? Your table probably looks okay (i.e. readable), but does it rock your world? Not so much.

There are lots of ways to make tables look good in InDesign. In this blog post, we’ll take you through the steps to create a simple yet attractive greyscale or color table. We’ll start by explaining InDesign’s cell and table styles, as they provide an easy way to make all the tables in your book consistent. [Read more…]

Filed Under: InDesign Tagged With: color, tables

Developing an eye for good design

February 8, 2016 By Glenna Collett 4 Comments

eye_openerIn Book Design Made Simple, we have given you samples and instructions that serve as foundations for your own book designs. And if you follow them, you can be certain that you have produced something very good. But are you confident about your work? Do you think it looks good? Do you wonder if anyone else will think it’s good? Do you worry that if you come up with ideas of your own they might be “bad”? [Read more…]

Filed Under: Book Cover Design Tagged With: color, typesetting

Categories

  • Book Design (22)
    • Book Cover Design (7)
    • Book Page Design (10)
  • InDesign (15)
  • Publishing (17)

Tags

book marketing book printing color contents copyright footnotes/endnotes images InDesign updates ISBN paragraph styles Photoshop tables text frames typesetting

Connect with us online

  • Email
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Twitter
  • YouTube

Recent Posts

  • How to fix book typesetting and layout issues in InDesign January 11, 2021
  • Book distribution 101 November 8, 2020
  • Design a workbook September 7, 2020
  • Combining serif and sans serif fonts July 12, 2020
  • A review of Affinity Publisher May 11, 2020
  • Design a children’s picture book March 9, 2020
  • Using InDesign keyboard shortcuts January 26, 2020

Join our book design community! Download chapters 1 to 9 of the book for free and receive book design updates via email.

Buy the book

Book Design Made Simple
Paperback: Amazon
Ebook: Apple Books, eBook.com

Blog awards

Copyright © 2020 - Fiona Raven and Glenna Collett

Read our privacy policy here.