Maria Mayer Feng

Case Study: Travel Book by Maria Mayer Feng

After a special vacation, making a book of your memories can be an equally special way of capturing and reliving your time away. A travel book is also a great way to share your memories with fellow travelers, or your friends and family at home.

We made this book for a client who had taken a big trip to Peru and Ecuador. This client is an artist who not only takes pictures on her phone throughout a trip, but also draws and paints watercolors along the way to capture all that she sees and does.

When she got home from her trip, our client mailed us a USB drive of her digital photos, plus the physical journal that she had been drawing in throughout the trip. We sorted her photos and scanned her drawings, which looked something like this:

We then retouched her drawings so that we could reproduce them in a professional and clean way, just like she had been drawing in the final book itself! We also photographed her journal so that she'd have a memory of the book she'd carried throughout the trip. We sorted out which drawings corresponded to which parts of the journey, and sometimes, we paired her drawing with a photo of the scene that it depicted.

We love how her drawings really bring alive the experience of her trip, as filtered through her own eye and hand. This book made a wonderful gift for her fellow travelers, who had probably been looking at her drawings over her shoulder with admiration throughout the trip.

Personal elements like drawings are always a great addition to a travel book, and if you're not an artist, these can also include handwritten captions, ticket stubs, maps, brochures, and more. For every project, we tailor every element of the book to its subject, using graphic elements, layout, size, binding and more to make the perfect book for each client. For this adventurous trip, this also meant highlighting some killer landscape shots that really captured the natural beauty they'd seen. What a fun project!

TIME Magazine names MOMMIE a Book of the Year for 2016 by Maria Mayer Feng

I am excited to share that TIME magazine has picked the 25 best photography books of the year for 2016—and one of them was Arlene Gottfried's MOMMIE, which I was honored to design!

Arlene and I put the first draft of this book together in 2012, when I was very pregnant with my first son. We spent a lot of time together editing the images down to the selection in the book, and then I designed the interior and cover. I hand-bound it and made 2 copies, one for her and one for myself as a studio copy. And with that, she went out to approach publishers. Eventually, PowerHouse in Brooklyn published it and engaged me as the designer—and it came out EXACTLY the way the dummy looked, which made Arlene and I very proud and happy. Congratulations, Arlene!