Creating the BMW Group + QUT Design Academy 2020 Photobook

If you’re up to date with Academy news and events then you may have seen that we recently completed our 2020 Photobook. I wanted to take a bit of time to provide an insight into the process and details of designing and printing it. Admittedly this was the first time that I had created and printed something like this, but the process was certainly rewarding and educational.

We started the photobook idea late last year (2020) with the intention of having another way for us to share more information about the Academy, along with personal experiences and travels from our past BMW Group interns. We also wanted to document the ever-growing list of students and staff who are – or have been – involved in the Academy.

An important part of the process was collecting the images for the photobook. We decided on a structure and creating different categories to show off the Academy: Internships, Special Projects, Technology + Facilities, Automotive, Germany + Abroad, People, and finally an Extra Collection for the additional images we just could not leave out. We were lucky that we had access to so many amazing photographs and renders created by current and past interns, so sourcing content for the photobook was easy. The challenging part was selecting a limited number of images when we had so many to choose from! Ultimately, we had to stay within a reasonable page count (and printing budget!). We believe the images we selected for the photobook best highlight the travel opportunities that a BMW Group Internship offers, details of BMW cars that we just absolutely drool over as designers and car fanatics, the high-end technology we have at our disposal in the office, plus the exceptional quality of work achieved through our Academy Internship and Special Projects Programs.

Once we had collected the relevant images we then designed a few different layouts, doing our best to stay true to the Academy branding, but also create a template that put as much attention on the images as possible. Parallel to this process was having discussions with various printing companies about paper stock and finishing options. At this point I’d like to say thanks to Snap Printing for all of their help and for printing our photobooks. 

Following the printer’s requirements for bleed and colour space, we created the document in InDesign. This brings me to what was the easily most crucial part of printing our photobook – having a proof copy printed. Immediately when reviewing the first proof we noticed that all the images printed a lot darker than what they appeared on the computer screen. I did not really consider this before printing, and as a result we lost a lot of details in our images. Fortunately, this was only a draft, so we were able to lighten all the images and confirm with a second proof. In addition to this, I learnt about perfect binding and how to create the files for the covers of the book – something I have never done before but glad I had the opportunity to learn.

If you have not seen our 2020 Photobook just yet, we have a digital version available on our website – go check it out as well as all our other publications! I am very much looking forward to finishing off our next publication, the 2020 Annual Progress Report, and sharing that in the near future.

Thanks for reading,

Jordan Domjahn
Design Associate

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