Illustrated Book Layout Designer

Illustrated Book Layout Designer — 32-page large-print activity book (InDesign, series template)
Overview
I’m publishing a large-print card game book for older adults — the first in a
continuing series — and I’m looking for a designer to lay out the interior and
build a master template I can reuse for future titles.
This is illustrated page design, not manuscript formatting. Every page has
artwork: watercolor bluebirds, botanical borders, playing card illustrations,
callout boxes and step diagrams. It’s much closer to a children’s picture book or
an activity book than to a novel. If your portfolio is mainly text-only books, we
probably aren’t a fit. The book
• 32 pages, trim size 8.5 × 11 inches, portrait
• Large print throughout — this is for readers with aging eyesight
• Ten card games, each a two-page spread with numbered steps and illustrations
• Front matter, two section dividers, and back matter
• Print only. No ebook.
• Two editions: Amazon KDP paperback, and a spiral-bound edition from a second
printer
The catch — please read before quoting
My existing pages are flattened images at 82–171 ppi. They were generated as
finished pictures, so there is no InDesign file, no Word document, and no live
text. The illustrations are baked into the page images and cannot be separated
out at full resolution.
So the text needs re-typesetting, and the artwork needs either extracting at its
current resolution or redrawing at print quality.
I’d genuinely like your opinion on how to handle this — it’s the biggest open
question in the project and I expect it drives the cost. Please tell me what
you’d recommend rather than assuming.
What I need delivered
1. Print-ready interior PDF at 300 ppi for KDP paperback
2. Print-ready interior for the spiral edition
3. Cover files for both (front/back artwork supplied; the KDP one needs a spine)
4. A reusable master template for future books in the series
Please price these separately.
The template matters most
I’m publishing a series, so the template is the real deliverable. Specifically:
• Built in Adobe InDesign (or Affinity Publisher — tell me which you’d use
and why)
• Paragraph and Character Styles for every text element, so type and color
can be changed globally rather than page by page
• Master Pages for each page type — game left page, game right page, section
divider, standard page
• An asset library of the recurring illustrations
• Working source files handed over, not just finished PDFs
I have a written brand standards document specifying exact fonts, hex colors,
CMYK values, margins and footer rules. I’ll share it once we’re talking.
Please include in your proposal
1. Two or three examples of illustrated books you’ve laid out
2. What you lay out in
3. How you’d handle the low-resolution artwork
4. Whether the template would be usable by another designer later, or only by you
5. Your timeline and cost, itemized
Proposals that don’t address point 3 won’t be considered — it’s the part I most
need help thinking through.
Fonts
Playfair Display, Lato and Poppins. All free Google Fonts.