Special Advertising Note: The following sponsored content is provided by one of Print’s partners, Blurb.
How-to instructions are the building blocks of, well, building things. But they’re generally pretty boring. Which is okay most of the time. But when your subject is surfboards, you need a style appropriate to the subject.
Enter Nick Welles, aka Welzie, of Two Crows Surfboards. His magazine-format guide to building surfboards is an explosion of style and color. With a dazzling combination of hand-painted backgrounds, doodles and his very own graffiti-style lettering, it’s unlike any set of step-by-step instructions you’ve ever seen.
As Welzie explains it:
The how to build a surfboard book comes from 15 years of building surfboards. I made a doodle one day, while having beers, about how to build a board. We made some shirts of the doodle and people liked it. I wanted to expand on the idea and put some details and tips we have learned on the way. Needless to say, it got way more in depth than I planned.
“In depth” means a 74-page magazine created with Blurb’s plug-in for Adobe InDesign. Scanning and photography brought the separate elements—the backgrounds and doodles—onto the pages. He then put it up for sale on the Blurb bookstore. The plug-in made it easy. The format made it affordable. And the beer probably also helped.
Want to create your own instructions, design portfolio, artistic experiment or workbook?
Best of all, you can save 20% with the promo code HOW26.
Offer valid through October 31, 2014 (11:59 p.m. local time). Valid for printed books only. A 20% discount is applied to your print book product total with no minimum purchase required. Maximum discount is USD $100, AUD $100, CAD $100, EUR €100, or GBP £100 off product total. This offer is good for one-time use, and cannot be combined with volume discounts, other promotional codes, gift cards, or used for adjustments on previous orders.