Each year, HANDS in Autism® puts on an Art Exposition designed to celebrate the lives and creativity of individuals with ASD and their families. This year, I (along with a few colleagues) planned, organized logistics, and overall created an experience for the participants that inspired joy. In this post, I want to highlight the program guide I designed to give to attendees. This booklet needed to contain the artwork, our messages, and thanks for our sponsors. It was my goal to create something of a keepsake for our participants to take home to show off their work to their friends and family.

To do this, I photographed each piece of work, edited them in Photoshop (in the case of sculptures, cutting them out with the Pen Tool.) Next I constructed master pages, paragraph styles, and character styles to create a framework in while to place the pictures and statements form artists. Once the content was proofed, revised, and finalized, I assembled the books.

For the interior, due to the busy nature of participants and their families, I assumed we would not receive all of the artwork in time to have the programs printed by an outside vendor. That left our laser printer to do the job. Since this printer does not print to the edge, I specifically designed the layout of the pages to include a quarter-inch white border so that all pages could be printed “at size” and maintain a perfect alignment for binding these half-sheet-size booklets.

However, with a desire to create a keepsake for the participants, we reached out to one of our print vendors to ask if they would donate covers on glossy card stock. They happily obliged and so the programs have a lovely colorful cover that’s printed to the bleed.