Designing Memoirs, Travel, and Family History Books at Scale
Role
Book Designer
Duration
Ongoing
Tools
Figma, Photoshop, Indesign
Team
Me
Developer
Overview
My Stories Matter is a storytelling start-up platform that helps individuals turn their life stories into professionally printed books. These books range from memoirs and family histories to travel journals and legacy projects, often containing hundreds of pages of long-form text, photos, and references. Each book begins as an unstructured manuscript, translated into a layout through an internal script, and further formatted by me.
Impact
40+
Books designed
150+
Additional copies ordered
60%
Reduction in manual formatting
01 — The TASK
Combine client-facing book design with continuous improvement to the internal formatting system.
02 — BOOK DESIGN & Formatting
Refining editorial design into a cohesive narrative.
Because My Stories Matter produces books at scale, interior layouts are initially generated using an automated InDesign script. This system is essential for efficiency—but automation alone can’t account for every nuance of long-form editorial design.
Common edge cases involve:
Removing common formatting disruptions such as widows and orphans
Applying paragraph and character styles
Creating custom tables
Text-wrapping images and applying the photos throughout the book
Creating indexes, subscript, end/footnotes, and identifying and adding in cross-referencing
03 — Collaboration with Engineering
Documenting edge cases and requesting improvements to speed up automation
I perform tasks such as cross-referencing and indexing manually to understand the full workflow, then document the steps and edge cases to inform script improvements. (See example below) This is just one of the many feedback loops and collaboration sessions performed with the developer to speed up the book design process.
04— Final DESIGNS
Beautifully designed books designed at scale
The result is a collection of cohesive, professionally designed books that:
Maintain consistency across large volumes of content
Feel human and readable despite automation
Adapt gracefully to different story types and structures
05 — Reflection
What I learned
1. Optimizing Workflows via Developer Collaboration
To address the repetitive nature of 100-page book layouts, I learned to audit my own design patterns and translate them into technical requirements. By providing our developer with screen-recorded process audits, I helped facilitate the creation of custom InDesign scripts. This shift from manual formatting to automated systems allowed our team to scale production while freeing up creative energy for high-level storytelling.
2. Indexing and cross-referencing
I learned to navigate 'unknown-unknowns' by independently mastering complex indexing workflows for a family history book with 100+ cross-referenced entries. Faced with the challenge of tracking minute dialectical changes, I invented a visual communication system from scratch, using green and pink highlights to signal approvals and updates for the client. This experience encouraged my ability to self-instruct on technical tools and design my own logical systems to solve high-stakes communication gaps.