Andrea Leda Awaken Book Design | Portland

When Life Coach Guru Andrea Leda contacted me, she was looking to launch Awaken Your Life for heart-centered entrepreneurs, a 200-hour intensive and certification for people ready to serve others through life coaching in a deep and impactful way.

Armed with a few Word documents, she needed the book designed to house the curriculum that she’d be teaching. It needed to be beautiful and inspiring enough that students would be thrilled to read it and keep it forever. It also needed to match her existing brand, be cost-effective to print, and easy for students to write in.

When my students and clients arrive at an event and are handed their book, I watch them sit down and slowly begin turning the pages like they’ve been handed living artwork. I have to tell them it’s ok to write in them! Most buy a second copy just to keep one pristine. It’s amazing.

Andrea Leda

“These books have a reputation all their own. When people join either Awaken Your Life or Awaken Your Practice, I hear that almost more than the program they are excited to finally get their book which they’ve heard so much about. I think they need their own Instagram account.

The best part of working with you is, um, ALL OF IT. You take a Word doc (a Word doc!) and when it comes back to me it’s my vision come to life. It’s like you crawl inside this magical place in my head where I fantasize about how I want my books to look and then you actually make it happen. For a writer and a teacher, seeing her work come to life in this way is such a gift to my soul.

If a friend were thinking of working with you, I would tell them to do it. now. or stay small. Your choice 🙂 Ok — I would tell them that when they’re ready to really be seen there is only one designer I trust to do this, and her name is Natalie McGuire.”

Andrea Leda,
Life Coach Guru

First, we started out designing a mood board that would set the stage for the rest of the book, using fonts and colors from her current branding scheme but bumped them up with a fresh interpretation.

Because her clients are typically highly sensitive, intuitive, and thoughtful people, it was important that the overall feeling of the book was one of tranquility, peace, and calm… a place where people could sink into the pages with a hot mug of tea and a blanket on their lap.

By using serene photos of nature scapes (beaches, forests, water, trees) and handmade graphic elements like paint splatters, doodles, and handwriting fonts, the cover, chapter page, and interior page quickly formed something that looked professional but cozy and perfectly imperfect thanks to the hand-made elements used throughout. The design has a welcoming feeling to it, ready to greet you with a big hug just as you are.

Mood Board Design

Awaken Your Life Mood Board Style Tile Design

Once the Mood Board was settled, we set out to design the actual 180-page book.

Though the book has exercises in it with actual journal pages to write in, we also wanted wide enough margins on the textbook pages themselves for people to feel free to write notes in too.

To keep costs down, we kept white borders around all the pages so bleeds wouldn’t need to be utilized and we could keep to printing at a standard paper size of 8.5″ x 11″.

For ease of use, when we printed the book, we went with a spiral binding so it’d be easy to turn pages and treat the book like a real journal that begs to be interacted with and used to share your deepest thoughts in without being too sacred.