Hot Couture Book

A friend and longtime hot sauce collector came to me with a dilemma. After decades of accumulating bottles, a new relationship and a nomadic lifestyle made keeping the physical collection impractical. He needed a way to preserve it before letting it go.

The goal was to produce an archival-quality photo book while keeping manual labor to a minimum. I sent him a link to a small USB-powered product photo booth and a tripod for his iPhone with one instruction: photograph every bottle head-on and send me the files.

I processed all the files with a Photoshop action to automatically key out each bottle and render it on both black and white backgrounds. In InDesign, I designed the book architecture and then ran a script to populate the document automatically, placing one image per page. Front and end matter were designed after this.

For illustration, Midjourney had launched just weeks earlier. The results were rough by today's standards, but early enough to be novel and usable for this particular project. I am not a fan of using AI image making or artwork for any paid gig, artists should get this work.

A 501-page hardcover archive of the entire collection. Printed through Lulu.com, with a retail price of $130 per copy. What could have been a weeks-long manual production job was reduced to a largely automated workflow. The entire book was designed and sent to the printer in a single afternoon.