Pocket Guide to Paris

As promised in my previous post, here's how I made the pocket guide to Paris as part of a thoughtful and useful wedding gift. The guide was based on my fiance and my own lovely experience in Paris last year. It was made to be brief but informative and travel friendly.

The guide starts with off with some tips and top must do's, then a 2-page map in the middle, and ends with an itinerary by area. It was simple to make, but took a bit of brain power in terms of the page order since I was doing double-sided printing. All you need are paper, ruler, sizzers and stapler.

To start, I found a cute Frenchy image on the internet for the cover...it came from a book I could not find the name to. I used Word and created a table with 2 columns and 2 rows on one page, and repeated that on page 2. The image was placed on the upper right cell on the first page.

For the bottom 2 cells, I merged them so it could fit a map. This was the center spread. I mapped out all the top must see's using Google Maps, did some cropping and many cut and paste to make it all fit, making sure they were readable.

Page 2 is where it gets a big difficult. The tricky part was to figure out the page arrangements since I was doing double-sided printing. For my 8-page mini guide, here's the layout in Word by pages I followed. Each cell represents their respective cells in a table by page.
All you have to do after printing the pages is to cut each page across by half, fold along the middle in each half, and staple. Here's what the first couple of pages inside look like after putting it all together.

All done!