Several years ago I made a book for a client to tell the stories from her fun birthday weekend celebration in Mexico. My husband and I were guests at this birthday bash and recently, with her permission, I redesigned the book to tell the story from our perspective!

To turn the original book into a fresh gift to ourselves, I followed these 3 steps:

1.  Edit Title Page: To introduce the weekend, I swapped out a photo and musings from the birthday girl with our photo and introductory text.

2.  Make Text Changes: Throughout the book, text was tweaked to read from our perspective and a few stories unique to our experience were added. I also removed several pages from the last day of the celebration when we were not present.

3.  Resize Book: The original book was a statement piece (as it deserved to be!) in a 13×11 hardcover format. I chose a more casual, 8×8 softcover book from a different printer for this weekend getaway. This size shift from landscape to square required a bit of trickery in inDesign. If you are not comfortable with this software, an easier (and great) choice would be to swap to a similar ratio, but smaller size (i.e. 10×8), format from the same printer. 

Wondering about the beautiful book cover? It is a photo of a painting we commissioned as a thank you gift to the hostess, find out more here!

While I’m not sure regifting to yourself is actually a thing, I do like how I was able to relatively easily repurpose one book for two different audiences. If you have ever created a digital photo book gift, perhaps this will inspire you to consider how it might also be enjoyed by someone else!