Bookmark Tutorial

Alright, this is basically just a post about how I made my bookmarks specifically designed for my books.  I didn’t really feel like paying someone a bunch of money to design me a bookmark so I designed my own.  But when I went to Staples and Walmart, neither one of them said they could print out bookmarks (I don’t understand why!), so I gave it a go myself.

So, here’s my tutorial.  With pictures.

 

Things I used to make my bookmarks:

 

Microsoft Publisher

Microsoft Power Point

A printer

Cardstock paper

Paint (for random photo manipulation)

Windows Live Photo Gallery (for some super easy photo editing)

 

Design your own bookmark.

 

I LOVED the idea of designing my own bookmark, and surprisingly it wasn’t too hard to make a nice-looking one.  I don’t have any fancy design or photo editing programs, so I just used Microsoft Publisher.

All I used for my bookmark was the cover of my book.  I used Windows Live Photo Gallery to crop a part of it to use as the backdrop, changed the colors a little bit and then pasted the whole cover photo on top of it using Publisher.  Then, I wrote some stuff relating to the story and put my name on it.  Also, I made a back for the bookmark and just put my website on it.

Once I was done with the bookmark, I highlighted everything in Publisher, right clicked, pasted it into paint and saved it as a photo to print later.

Below, are the two bookmark types I made (front and back).

 

Format for printing.

 

I used Microsoft Power Point for formatting and printing.

 

I’m not very good at the whole spatial positioning thing and envisioning how something will turn out when you print it, so I failed quite a few times on this step.  Basically, if you want double sided bookmarks (which are so much cooler ) you’ll need to remember to center the bookmark file in the middle of the page, so that when you turn it over and print on the other side of the page, they will line up when you cut the bookmark out.

 

But I thought that wasting a whole piece of paper on one bookmark was kind of a waste, so I pasted about four next to each other, positioning the whole clump in the center of the page.

I used Microsoft Power Point to format and print the bookmarks, and in this photo you can (hopefully) see the dots across the page that will help you align the bookmarks to make them center.

In this photo, you can see how the back of the bookmarks are lined up the same was the front ones are.

 

So you print the front side out, flip the paper over, and print on the back side of it.  Depending on what kind of printer you have, this might take a few tries to get it right, but it shouldn’t be too difficult.

 

Then, you can cut them out and give them to people or whatever.

 

Feel awesome. 

 

You just made some ridiculously cool bookmarks.  So smile.