Confession time: I love books. I realize that may not be much of a revelation, coming from someone who mostly reads and writes for a living. So, let me clarify it. I love physical books. No disrespect to their hip cousins, the ebooks. But given a choice, I will always opt for a physical book over an ebook. I love feeling the weight of a book in my hands, the texture of the pages, the smell of ink and paper. Can’t get any of those with an ebook.

In fact, bookmaking is my hobby. Sometimes I make them from scratch, designing, cutting, folding, and gluing a new book into existence. Other times, I make use of self-publishing services such as Blurb, where I recently had a book of my favorite photos printed as a gift for a friend. I think it’s important for creatives who primarily do digital work (like myself) to occasionally make an actual thing that people can hold.

So, when the idea arose to do an article on print on demand services, I was on board immediately. And I knew the perfect author for the article—someone with a discerning eye for print quailty, a knowledge of book production techniques, and a flair for design. That someone is Maya P. Lim, and you can read her findings on self-publishing with Blurb, Lulu, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble in this month’s feature article.

Next, Illustrator pro (and jazz vocalist!) Laura Coyle shows how to get the most out of one of those newfangled AI features in Illustrator: Generative Recolor. Unlike some applications of AI, which come with ethical or legal complications, this one’s a pure creative boost.

Erica Gamet rolls up with a bountiful bouquet of tips and tricks for all your favorite apps. With its great tidbits on mood boards, CC Libraries, cast shadows, charts and graphs, text warp, GREP, and more, I guarantee there’s something in there for you.

Then, we go back to the world of books and other long documents with a clever combination of InDesign’s Print function and Acrobat Distiller to make a flatplan PDF with thumbnail views of all the pages of a document.

The Resource of the Month is a sweet little pattern set called Peaches and Petals. It’s an Illustrator file, but like all our pattern sets, just add it to a CC Library and you can also use the patterns in Photoshop or InDesign.

Enjoy!