Creating a book cover - iBooks Author Tutorial

- Let's get started by building our Explore California Travel Guide book cover. To begin, simply come over to the sidebar and click on Book Title. The Book Title template will appear and now we can begin customizing our book. Let's start with the title. To begin editing the title, simply click on the book title, then click again to get your cursor to appear inside of it. And now we're going to go ahead and select the title and we're going to type in using all caps EXPLORE California. Now California, I'm only going to capitalize the C and the rest of it will all be lowercase. Then, we'll go ahead and change the font. So, let's go ahead and select that entire line of text again and we'll come up here to our formatting toolbar, click the drop-down menu, and I'm going to select Palatino as my font. It looks a little bit better. Now we'll go ahead and just shrink down the text for just EXPLORE. So, I'll just select the text for EXPLORE and I'll change the font size here to 72. It'll make it a little bit smaller and clean up a little bit. Now we'll adjust the spacing that we have between the EXPLORE and California. We'll do that again in the formatting palette using the choose the line spacing tool and we'll click the drop-down menu and change it to 0.6. That'll tighten up those two lines of text a little bit. Now let's go ahead and add a background image. Come over to the upper right-hand corner and click on the Media tool. Make sure that you're in the Photos tab and click on Folders and then select 01_pictures. Here you should find all of the images that we imported for this chapter. Scroll down until you find the cover_image and click and drag that file and drop it onto the main window of your book. You can see the image is automatically set as the background for this file. To edit the image, simply double-click on it and it becomes selected. We can click and we can drag the image so that we can get the exact alignment that we're looking for. You may need to click the Edit Mask button in the Heads up display to re-position the image. I want to make sure that I've got the image so that the right-hand edge of the image is aligning over here on the right-hand side of my file, and I've got the coverage all the way down to the bottom. You may need to make sure that you change your view so that Fit to Page is selected so you can see all of the file. Now we have a nice background image for our cover. Let's go ahead and edit some more text here. We'll go ahead and change the lorem ipsum text that's at the top by clicking on it and then selecting it. And now let's call this our 2012 TRAVEL GUIDE. And I'm going to do this in all caps as well. Let's make another text change. Instead of the author down here at the bottom, we'll go ahead and select that. And now we'll type in the web address for Explore California, which is simply www.explorecalifornia.com When we click off of that URL, we'll see that the URL highlights and becomes an active web link. Well, on the book cover, we don't necessarily want this to be an active web link. We'll click to the right of the web address to select the box, and then we'll double-click inside of the box to select the text. Next, we'll open up our Inspector and we'll go over here to the right-hand side of the Inspector to the Link Inspector. And with that link selected, we can uncheck the box for Enable hyperlink. Now our explorecalifornia is simply some text that's appearing inside of our document. Our page is looking a little bit better, but let's add a few more things. Let's go ahead and close our Media browser and let's add in our Explore California logo. You could, of course, add the logo from the Media window as we did with our background image. But I want to show you another way of adding an image. I'm going to go ahead and jump over to my finder where I already have my Chapter 01 Exercise Files folder opened up. And I've got it opened up to the pictures folder. Here I've got my logo_final.gif. I'm going to simply drag that logo icon and I'm going to drop it over here on the right-hand side to the right of my page. I don't want to drop it into the middle of my page, because then it's going to set that image as a background. I'm going to drop it to the right-hand side, and I'm going to close my window. And you can see I've got a small selection here but there's nothing showing up. But if I click and simply drag that selection now onto my page, my logo shows up onto my cover. I'm going to place my logo here in the upper right-hand corner, and I'm going to grab the lower left-hand corner of it and I'm going to drag it up until my logo is about 125 pixels wide. And then I'm going to release. Next, let's add a little more interest to our layout here. Let's add a footer element down at the bottom. To do that, we'll come up here to the Shapes, we'll click the drop-down menu and we'll simply add a box shape. And I'll go ahead and stretch that box shape out so it's quite a bit wider than needed. But it's height is going to remain at about 100 pixels. We'll go ahead and take and drag that box all the way down towards the bottom so that it snaps right to the bottom of my page. Now in my Inspector, I'm going to go over here to my Graphics inspector and I'm going to change my fill for this box to be a Color Fill. Then we need to choose the color. We'll go ahead and click the color chip and it's going to automatically open up our color palette for us. I've got a lot of different colors that I can choose from, but I think what I want is I want to grab one of these nice yellow hues out of the image itself. So, I'll click on the little magnifying glass, and then come over and I'll hover right over top until I find one of these nice golden colors that's right here on the rock. I'll select that, and now so that I can save that color, I'm going to simply grab the color and I'm going to drag it down here into my color chips so I can get back to that color at a later time. A solid color is pretty nice, but it would be nice to have a little bit of transparency to this. So with the box still selected, we're back here on our Graphics Inspector, I'll go ahead and drag the opacity down to about 50%. That's looking much better, but now my text is hidden behind the box. That's not a problem. We'll simply come up here to the Arrange drop-down menu and there's an option for Send Backwards, or we can send it all the way to the back and then move it forward a little bit. So just go ahead and start with the Send Backward and we'll note the keyboard command of cmd + opt + shift + b. So if we've moved it back once, it didn't quite make it there. So we'll do cmd + opt + shift + b and we'll press that a few times until the explorecalifornia web address just appears over top. Now we can select that web address and drag it down so that it's centered inside of the yellow bar. That's looking a lot better. Let's go ahead and move our Explore California title down towards the bottom of our page also. You'll notice as I move the object around, that I'm getting alignment guides that are snapping to show me when I have text aligned. If I pull my text down too far, you'll see that it gets hidden behind the yellow box. So you want to move it up until it's just displaying properly, and then release. Let's add a little bit more interest to the EXPLORE in California. So to do that, we'll simply click inside of the text, and select EXPLORE. We'll go ahead and we'll treat this text with another custom color. Select the word EXPLORE, and then in our Inspector, click on the Text Inspector and click on the color chip to change the color of this particular selection of text. Since our color palette is already open, again we're going to use the magnifying glass to select a color out of our existing image. Only this time, we're going to select the golden color out of our Explore California logo. So just hover the magnifying glass over top of that color and we'll get the color appearing. And once more, we'll drag that color chip down into the bottom so we can reuse that color anytime we want throughout our book. Let's make one more color change. Let's come up here to the top where our travel guide is. We'll go ahead and select the travel guide. Click and select it. Again, in our Text Inspector, click the color chip so that it's active, click the magnifying glass, and now we'll select one of the nice dark brown colors out of this moss that's growing on the rock lower down on our image. That's looking much better. Our cover is looking pretty good now at this point. Let's make one more adjustment. We want to make sure that the top of our 2012 Travel Guide aligns with the top of the image. But as we click and drag that portion of the image, we see that our aligning guides are not really helping us out here. So let's remedy that. If we go up to the iBooks Author menu at the top and then select Preferences, and then click on the Rulers tab, we can check the box to Show guides at object edges. When we close the Preferences and now move our Travel Guide, we can see that the left-hand side of our Travel Guide is aligning with our text at the bottom. And when we snap to the top, it aligns with the top of our Explore California logo. So now our page has a much cleaner look to it. All of our elements are aligning with each other, and we're ready to move on to the next step of building our book.