The week before last my 2012 photobook arrived and I finally got to reap the reward for all those hours spent editing photos and creating photobook pages. I am really happy with how it turned out. It was my third time ordering from Blurb and by now I've mostly figured out how to get the result I want.
As an added bonus I had my 2009 book reprinted in the 7 x 7 small square size. I ordered it from a different site back in the day since I got a free sample and I was never happy with how the colours came out and wanted the books to all look the same. Next year I am going to reprint my 2010 book as well. I did order it from Blurb but it contains many photos that are not so dear to my heart anymore. That's the one downside to printing photobooks rather than traditional scrapbooking - you can't just rip photos out or replace them after the book is finished without redoing the whole thing. I thought I'd have the 2010 book reprinted in the small square size but I think I am going to stick with the original 12 x 12 size because the 7 x 7 is just so tiny! It was great for the 2009 book though because I didn't take many photos back then and it's only 26 pages long. The 2011 and 2012 books are 116 pages each, on the other hand.
I will definitely be making another book like this for 2013, and I hope to keep making them. While I often glance longingly at the beautiful Project Life pages people post on Instagram and various blogs I know it's just not for me at this time in my life. I don't even own a printer and I don't really have the space for scrapbooking supplies either. Keeping it all in your computer works out so much neater when you live in a one bed apartment. That's not to say I won't try it out in the future though.
This year I have learned to streamline my photobook making process. When I did my 2011 pages I'd skip wildly from one part of the year to the next and ended up using a number of different fonts and templates and ended up with a book far less consistent than I'd like. On the other hand I scrapbooked 2012 chronologically, used the same couple of fonts throughout the book and templates that were similar to each other. I also started each new "chapter" of the book with one big photo on the left side and small ones on the right side. This all made the finished book more consistent than my 2011 one. I still use very few embellishments and prefer to let the photos stand out on their own but I do make good use of my large collection of backgrounds.
The 2012 book is the first one I've included photos from my phone in. I got my iPhone in early 2012 and at first I wasn't sure how I'd combine my many Instagram photos with the DSLR ones, but I figured out a method and the iPhone photos printed really well, too. Some were of lower resolution than they should have been but you can't tell from the finished pages. I will definitely be including iPhone photos in the future as well.
Technical details for those who are interested:
Company: Blurb
Size: 12 x 12 & 7 x 7.
Design software: I make all the pages in Photoshop and create the book through Bookify on the Blurb webpage.
Paper: Matte premium.
Cover: Wrap-around. I have always disliked dust covers on books so this choice is an easy one.
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