Designing your own memory book — a graduation album, a photo book, a family keepsake — is one of the most meaningful projects you can make with your own hands. The trouble is that there's almost no detailed, start-to-finish guidance out there, which is exactly why we wrote this. After a lot of deliberation we settled on Canva to teach the whole workflow, and it works just as well for photo albums and ordinary books as it does for memory books. Best of all, you don't need Illustrator, InDesign, or Photoshop to end up with a print-ready file.
Choosing your book structure
Books can be bound in several ways, but two structures come up again and again for memory books: the thread-sewn hardcover and the butterfly (lay-flat) hardcover. The rest of this guide is built around these two.
A hardcover book has cover boards made from thick greyboard (the trade term for the dense card inside a hard cover) glued together. It feels weighty and premium in the hand, which makes it the natural choice for a memory book. The difference between the two bindings is how they open: a butterfly (lay-flat) book lies completely flat at 180°, while a thread-sewn book does not. The trade-off is page count — a lay-flat book tops out at 52pp, whereas a thread-sewn book accepts any page count in multiples of 4, up to around 500–600pp. (PP means page, i.e. a printed side: one sheet of paper has two sides, so 2PP.)
Choose your binding based on the page count and finish you want, then decide on a size — A5, A4, or A3. (For short runs, the largest available is a portrait A3 book.)
Want to understand the different book structures in more depth? See Three ways to print a hardcover book: graduation albums, wedding albums, and product catalogues.
Before you design: setting up your file
Once you've settled on a binding, you can start designing in Canva. It's a free online tool, but it can export exactly the kind of print-ready PDF a printer needs — and that's where it beats other free platforms.
- Set your page size. (A3 memory book: 420×297mm; A4 memory book: 210×297mm; A5 memory book: 210×148mm.)
- In the file settings, switch on the ruler, guides, margins, and print bleed:
- Ruler — used to measure dimensions; works together with the guides.
- Guides — used to align your design. Drag them out from the ruler; they won't appear in the exported file.
- Margins — the print safe area. Keep all your text and images (anything important) inside the margins so your content isn't clipped by cutting tolerance.
- Print bleed — the bleed area guards against trimming error. Canva's own elements usually fill the bleed automatically; if something doesn't reach the edge, extend it by hand.
- Add as many pages as you need. If your design runs past the page limit, split it across several files — the printer prints your pages in order, so you don't need to reshuffle them. P.1 is the cover, P.2 is the inside front cover (the page mounted onto the hard board), P.3 is your first content page, and so on through to the back cover.
Set everything up to the sizes above and you'll have a layout ready to fill.
The exact file settings differ slightly depending on your binding.
Perfect-bound hardcover / perfect-bound (glued) book
Perfect binding needs 10mm reserved on every page for the glued spine edge, so all of your important content — text or images — must sit inside the safe area. The upside is that the key parts of your memory book won't disappear into the binding edge or end up too close to the trim.
Lay your content out this way and it will print clearly and in full.
Thread-sewn hardcover / lay-flat hardcover / saddle-stitch
With these bindings the spine edge eats into the spread. A thread-sewn hardcover is bound by stitching the sheets together with thread rather than glue. A lay-flat (butterfly) hardcover is made by mounting two sheets back to back, so it has no binding-edge restriction. A saddle-stitched book is held together with staples through the spine, much like a thread-sewn book. One warning: with thread-sewn and saddle-stitched books the page count must be a multiple of 4, or the book simply can't be printed.
Lay your content out this way and it will print clearly and in full.
Starting your design
With your file set up, you can move on to the design itself. Canva is a genuinely smart tool: once you've set the page size, it suggests templates that fit those dimensions. If one of them suits your book it's well worth using — though the free elements on offer are fairly limited.
A note on fonts
As an overseas company, Canva's support for Chinese fonts is on the thin side. You can get around this by signing up for a Canva membership (the first 30 days are free), which lets you upload the fonts already installed on your computer. On Windows they live in the Fonts folder; on a MacBook you'll find them in Font Book. We'll cover fonts in more depth in a future article.
A note on uploading images
You can upload any image into Canva to design with. The one thing to remember is that Canva will not raise an image's resolution for you: if a photo is blurry before you upload it, it will be blurry afterwards, and it will be blurry in print too. Never assume that Canva — or your printer — can magically sharpen the images inside your memory book.
If the only photo you have is blurry and there's no alternative, take a look at our guide to enlarging images without losing quality.
Words for your memory book
Finding the right words is the part people agonise over most — a line that's both tasteful and genuinely meaningful is hard to write without a certain feel for language. To help, we found a collection of quotes worth borrowing from: graduation yearbook messages. Some lines really do leave a lasting impression.
Life's greatest sorrow is to squander your youth. May you treasure these golden years and never stop growing.
Finishing your design and exporting
Congratulations — you've now worked through the design of your whole memory book. The most important step comes next: exporting the file. There's a Download button in the top-right corner of the page; under file type choose "PDF Print", and tick "Crop marks and bleed". The PDF that comes out will then include the bleed and meet print quality.
Printing your memory book
With your file exported, place your order on Printing Banana's booklet ordering page, choosing the binding and page count you designed for. During checkout you can upload the PDF you exported from Canva; if the file is too large, send it to us via WeTransfer instead. We deliver across Hong Kong and Macau, and if you're unsure about binding or page count, WhatsApp us at +852 3001 5678 — English is fine.
Thanks for reading the whole way through — we hope you design a memory book you'll love.