Partnership with Blurb

It is with great excitement that we announce our new partnership with Blurb, a self-publishing platform that makes it easy to design, publish, promote, and sell professional-quality printed books and ebooks. Blurb recently added notebooks to their offerings and we were delighted to test out their BookWright software to create a small series of custom notebooks. These notebooks are now for sale on our page in the Blurb Bookstore, and feature the work of six of our talented Textile Design Lab members, as well as a workbook that Chelsea and Michelle developed with surface pattern designers in mind.

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Using the BookWright Software

Blurb’s BookWright software was easy to pick up, and as Photoshop users, many of the tools were familiar and felt intuitive to use. Blurb’s excellent Help Center was also a fantastic resource when any questions did arise.

We chose to create a 6″x9″ softcover journal, and from there we were able to add images and text to the front and back cover, and to fill the notebook with layouts of our choosing.

One of the fun features that we enjoyed using in creating our journal was the option for each page to have a different page style, either blank, lined or a grid. This was controlled for each page individually and was nice to have that flexibility to make a more varied and interesting notebook.

We also appreciated that there was an option to set up our own palette, as we use a specific set of colors for Pattern Observer’s branding, so this was a great time-saver throughout the process of putting together our journal.

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The Textile Design Lab Journal Contest

We had so much fun creating our pattern design journal, that we wanted to extend the opportunity to design journals for the Blurb Bookstore to our Textile Design Lab community. With the help of our studio agent Melissa Schulz, we put together a series of briefs for Lab members focusing on five themes we currently see trending for journals: Confetti, Feel Good, Geometrics, Refined Doodles, and Retro. We then asked participants to apply these trends to any of the five following journal concepts: a quote journal, children’s gratitude journal, list journal, book journal, or a beverage journal. Using the BookWright software, designers had one week to create cover art as well as the interior layouts for the journals. We received over 100 beautiful submissions and in the end selected the following winning designs:
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Claudia Negru (Quotes Journal), Esther Jongste (Beverage Journal), Nikkita Cohoon (Lists Journal), Chris Olson (Children’s Gratitude Journal), Patricia Hooning (Book Journal) and Cynthia Jacquette (Children’s Gratitude Journal)

Congratulations to the winners, and a huge thanks to all the participants who put in such hard work to create their journals!!

Please check out our new storefront in the Blurb Bookstore and let us know if you launch your own!

At Pattern Observer we strive to help you grow your textile design business through our informative articles, interviews, tutorials, workshops and our private design community, The Textile Design Lab.

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