Creating Book Designer Templates

Looking for a fast way to create quick pages?
(and maybe even make some money?)

Creating your own templates for the Online Book Designer is a great way to expand your creativity, as well as make money from your designs. Templates can easily be created on your desktop computer, however there are several requirements.

Template Sizes

Like all of PrestoPhoto's books, each template has one of 5 ratios. The ratio is length to height, just like 16:9 is a common wide screen television ratio. Your template PDF must be one of the following sizes:

Short Instructions:

Create a PNG Quick Page image according the chart above, then upload it in Template Designer. If one of your pages is meant to be the cover, check the "cover" checkbox. Draw in your dropzones in descending order of size. This allows customers to swap templates easily, and maintain a similar picture quality.

Note: When creating templates, do not use gradients, as this can cause "ghosting" around an image. It will not print well.

Step by Step Instructions

Here are step-by-step instructions to create a template courtesy of Creative Eyes

1. Go to the "Create Template" page under it are fields for adding your title, detailed description, price ect.
2. Click on the "Upload New Quick Page" text. A pop-up window will open to let you select your pages for uploading. Do NOT use the upload function farther down into the text. This is for the preview to display in the marketplace. If you get an error uploading a png here, it is because your file does not meet the size specifications. Please double check your file size.
3. Your png files should now be at the top of the page. Click on them to add the dropzones. They should open in a new pop-up window. Now you draw the dropzones yourself with the mouse. As I said, only limit at the current version: you can only do square/rectangular shapes and you cannot rotate them. Add the dropzones to all your pages.

Screenshots that demonstrate the incorrect and correct way to apply drop-zones / layer order


4. To change the page sequence you click on the little button at the top, right corner. It shows grey squares and yellow + green arrow. It will allow you to drag and drop them into the desired sequence.
5. Add all your descriptions, title, pricing. Change setting from “private” to something like “request general availability”.
6. Scroll down to the end and click on “save”.
7. The template should now appear in your template list. When you open it, you will normally see the detailed view customers will see in the marketplace as well. To edit them again, click on the small pencil at the right upper corner and it takes you to the edit-mode again.

If you need rotated drop zones, or have other advanced graphical needs, see Advanced Template Creation.

Here are some tips for selling your templates on PrestoPhoto.