Black board, white Helvetica, two words: Our People. Andy McCredie's square hardback is a book of portraits, one face per spread, each sitter's name set large above a story told in their own words. Andy made it as a record of his year group at RADA and needed it for a presentation on Friday 17 September, a deadline he called absolute. He was also, as he told us, "very new to printing". We printed it as a 210×210mm case-bound book with printed endpapers, and it remains one of the most quietly assured photobooks to have crossed our desk.
Andy's very first email was about the endpapers. He wanted the page glued inside the board and the page beside it to read as one spread, and our single-page file spec seemed to split them apart. Endpapers are artwork in their own right, so we sent him our endpaper templates and asked for the cover and both sets of ends as spreads, with the book as single pages in reading order, and he had them right that evening. Lift the cover and you see why he cared. Front and back, a full-bleed pattern repeats "I blinked. You blinked." in bold white on black, one phrase picked out in grey so the eye snags on it, printed in full colour on 170gsm uncoated. Plain white endpapers are the default; printed ones are the detail people notice first and remember longest.
The portraits move between black and white and colour: a photographer with a camera to his eye in grainy monochrome, a young man before a wall of houseplants, a woman in a leather jacket laughing over a patterned mug. Mike read the files from cover to cover at preflight and told Andy what an inspiring book it was. We had quoted 130gsm silk; Andy, after watching, in his words, "approximately one video", wrote: "I think the thicker paper feels a bit more professional", and, more to the point, "I don't want it to feel cheap basically". As a goodwill gesture we upgraded the inside pages to 170gsm silk at no extra charge. Silk takes an image crisply, so skin tone and shadow hold in both modes, and sixty-six pages of the heavier sheet give every turn a deliberate weight.
The cover is printed on 170gsm silk, matt laminated and wrapped over a greyboard case; on solid black, the film is what stops scuffs and fingerprints. The first cover file was a flat 430×210mm spread with no allowance for the wrap. A 210×210mm hardback with a 10mm spine needs a 473×250mm cover spread so that roughly 17mm of printed silk can fold around the boards. We caught it at preflight on the afternoon of 1 September and sent Andy our 210×210mm hardback template and guide. His wraparound version, "completely black around the edges", was back within half an hour. The spine got the same care: Andy had allowed 11mm, and for 66 pages of 170gsm silk in a case we set it at 10mm and sent a template to match.
With the date fixed, a proof and a full run back to back would have been a scramble, so we suggested a single advance copy first. The books left us on the Thursday, and on Friday 17 September they were on a van to south-east London with a one-hour delivery slot.
⚠️ Case binding cannot be hurried; when the date is fixed, the order of operations is everything.
Our People is a square hardback photobook, one of the formats we print most often for photographers, and the same build suits a graduating year or a theatre company. See our photobook printing and hardback book printing pages, and for another photographer's case-bound book, the Hasselblad 500 photography book we printed.
Planning your own? Get a price on our Printed Project Builder or talk it through with Harriet and Mike, first-timers very much included.
