I designed these instagram posts, myself, completely from scratch! This is a personal tradition for me for the past four years – a fun way to summarize book recommendations while also teaching myself new design tools.
About the design process: This tradition started for me in 2021 as, honestly, a complete rip-off of the annual Obama’s Favorite Books post. I copied the layout and fonts almost exactly, but added my own flair – for example, Obama doesn’t list the book genre, which I’ve always wished he did to make it easier to know what I might personally want to read.
In 2022, I started learning Adobe Illustrator to up my infographic game. That’s when I started being more original with the design itself and incorporating the book cover art; similar to knowing the book’s genre, I think seeing its cover helps people who see this post more quickly guess what they would want to check out. In my first Illustrator-aided post, I played with the concept of the book covers as a color wheel.
By 2023 I was quite a bit better at Illustrator. For this concept, I used tiki bar menus as an inspiration – quirky font, punches of color, with the books organized by genre (like a menu would be organized by course).
For 2024, I wanted to try out designing from scratch in Canva. My design inspo was based on old school computer manuals or NASA reports. I love a monospaced font (i.e., every character takes up the same width) and the general vibe of 1970s futurism.
About the books: I read about 50 books a year – and, yes, I count audiobooks as reading (don’t be a hater). I am an avid GoodReads user, but an increasingly conflicted one due to the Amazon of it all; unfortunately, while other book apps are better at tracking what you’ve read, GoodReads has given me so much value in discovering what to read next from friends, books lists, and books-like-these algorithms.
In terms of how I get these books – library gang, rise up! Right now, I’m just on Libby with the LA Public Library; probably 90% of what I read is an audiobook or ebook from here. I know others who have memberships to multiple libraries (LA County, Pasadena, Beverly Hills) across multiple apps (Hoopla, Overdrive). But I’m a simple lady, I suppose…who already has 80 apps open at a time and doesn’t need to add more fuel to that battery draining fire. I just always make sure to have 6 or so books in my Libby holds queue, and often will trawl the ‘Skip The Line’ list for popular books that normally have a long wait. When I want a physical book, Skylight Books in Los Feliz is such a local gem.
