Digital Design Specialties
From manuscript to finished book
The visual language of your book is as much a part of the story as the words themselves. Our design services can be engaged individually to meet you wherever you are in the process, or combined into a seamless experience as part of a full publishing package. Either way, the standard of care is the same.
Cover Illustration & Graphic Design
Your cover is the first promise you make to a reader. At Plumb Creative Books, cover design is a collaborative process—we take the time to understand your story, your aesthetic, and what you want readers to feel before a single decision is made. The result is a cover that is distinctly yours: a piece of visual storytelling that reflects the depth of what's inside. That same care extends to supporting materials: bookmarks, posters, event graphics, and anything else that carries your book into the world.
Photo Restoration & Editing
Old photographs hold entire worlds: a gesture, a room, a face that deserves to be seen clearly. Our photo restoration work brings faded, damaged, or aged images back to life, correcting color, repairing tears, and sharpening details with a careful hand that honors the original. We treat each image as an artifact worth preserving, not just a file to be processed. Restored photos integrate seamlessly into your book's design, so your visual history is as vivid as the story it accompanies.
Full Layout & Formatting
A beautifully written story deserves an equally beautiful home on the page. Our layout and formatting work is guided by professional publishing standards, with careful attention to typography, spacing, image placement, and the small decisions that separate a polished book from a printed manuscript. Every element, from chapter headers to margins to the flow of text around photographs, is considered with your reader's experience in mind. The result is a book that reads as good as it looks.
Ephemera Digitization
The texture of a life isn't only found in words; it lives in handwritten letters, ticket stubs, wedding programs, newspaper clippings, and the worn edges of a recipe card. Our digitization service captures these fragments at archival quality, preserving not just the image but the feeling of the original. Digitized pieces can be woven throughout your book's design or housed in a dedicated archive for your family to access for generations.
Featured Projects
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Cocktails, Cuisine, and Classic Cinema
This was a full book in every sense — a twelve-month project from concept to finished product. We designed the complete package: cover, interior layout, typography, and all the visual elements that make a book feel cohesive and considered from the first page to the last. A project that rewarded the kind of sustained attention that only a long collaboration makes possible.
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My Century in Motion
A century of living generates a lot to work with — photographs, documents, memories layered on memories. Our job with this memoir was to make all of it feel coherent and dignified on the page, with interior layout and typesetting that gives Dan Bulkley's extraordinary story the presentation it earned.
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Vasto's Vault
Six books, one world, and a full year's worth of design work. We handled the complete visual package for the Vasto's Vault series — cover design for all six volumes, interior layout throughout, and custom graphics that helped build out the look and feel of the collection from the inside out. The goal was a series that works as individual volumes and as a unified whole, the kind of shelf presence that makes readers want to collect them all.
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American Ice Cream
Kirsten’s memoir of her 1960 summer in America as a Danish Girl Scout is the kind of book where the visual elements are as much a part of the story as the words. We handled the full design — cover, interior layout, and photo restoration work that brought her personal photographs back to their full warmth and clarity. With one cherished recipe woven into the pages, every design decision was made to honor the intimacy of the story being told.
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The Little Black Hole
Maiko's book presented a particular design challenge and a particular pleasure: integrating Larissa's illustrations into the layout alongside the text in a way that felt intentional and seamless. We handled the full interior design, treating the illustrated elements with the same care as the typography so that every page reads as a complete, unified composition.
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A Lifetime in the Atmosphere
It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more.
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a deep dark black ray of sunshine
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The Legend of Sensei Tsinelas
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Faultland
Julie's work on Faultland came through her graduate publishing cohort at Portland State — a focused, technical project of adapting the book's existing printed cover for the audiobook format. A small intervention, but one that required a precise understanding of how a design translates across very different contexts.
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The Blue Line Letters
Julie contributed to this Ooligan Press title as part of her graduate publishing cohort at Portland State, designing a bookmark to accompany the book's launch. One piece, but part of a larger collaborative effort to give the book a full and professional presence in the world.
Before & After: Photo Restoration
“Julie did an amazing job restoring some of the very old pictures and scrapbooks that I had in my archives. I had no clue that they could become that clear and easy to see.”
Kirsten Hendershot, American Ice Cream
Every design begins with a conversation.
Not sure where to start? We'll figure it out together. Reach out for a free consultation, and we'll talk through your project, your vision, and which services make the most sense for where you are in the process.