Earlier this year I agreed to help a colleague design and layout two family history book. I wanted the experience of laying out a book so I took on the project. What an experience it was! multiple hours were required to to accomplish the task put to me. But I enjoyed it and loved learning some new things about book publication.
Organization is key
One of the foremost things I learned is that both you and the client need to be organized for the layout to go smoothly. Key to this is clear precise communication of what is expected. Both you and the client need to develop a vision of what the end project is to be. Obviously this will change as the production progresses. The client gave me a huge amount of artistic freedom. But when it came to the structure of each section and chapter he knew, for the most part, what he wanted. I was lucky enough to have a client who organized photos into folders based on each section of the book. He also created a word doc with an outline of where information and photos would go in the book. Without these key items of organization I would have had to bother the client over and over for where thing were to go. This would have been a huge time-waster
Use professional software and know the tools
Another set of skill I learned revolved around my use of InDesign. This is Adobe's professional program for laying out multi-page documents. When it comes to dynamic layouts and massive page counts this is the program to use. The tools and ease of use are top notch. I had to learn how to create sections for this particular project.
Samples
Below are a few sample pages of one of the books I laid out. If you would like to see the complete book
go to this link to view the PDF.
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