Recently in design Category

There was a lot of talk about photo books this holiday season and I had been asked on numerous occasions if I had used Blurb to create one. I had not used Blurb before. But I had heard of them because of their association with Flickr. After the craziness from the holidays died down, I decided to investigate a little further. I was immediately impressed with their pricing and the number of pages their books were able to hold. The books I've made in the past were limited to under 100 pages. Blurb books are expandable to 440 pages.

Next question was what kind of book should I make. Blurb has templates for all sorts of books -- cook books, photo books, portfolio books, blog books, and more. Yup, you can actually import your blog into their software and make a book out of it. Since I have pretty much stopped scrap-booking when I started taking digital photos (way back in 2001), I decided to make a book about our 2007. I added blog posts from 2007 and photos taken from 2007.

The Blurb software was quickly downloaded and installed (even on my mac -- MyPublisher finally has mac software, but it took them a long time to get it). It easily integrated with my Flickr account and I was able to select and add pictures easily. Since I didn't choose a blog book as my book type, I couldn't figure out how to import my blog posts, so they were copy and pasted into the pages. I didn't spend too much time trying to figure that out. As far as the functionality of the software, it seemed to be on par with the others I've used. The software did allow me to use any fonts installed on my computer and they printed without any issues.

What about quality? The quality was decent. The pages aren't as high of a gloss as the other books I've made. The photos appear a bit too dark (which I have read in other reviews). But overall I am very pleased with the results and will probably continue the tradition of throwing together blog posts, photos and other mementos from the year and publishing a yearly book. (If I was smart, I'd work on it though out the year.)

Below are a few pictures of the finished book.

Above is the cover with a selection of photos summarizing the year

One of the first events of the year was Cisco's trip to the vet for stitches in his ear (which was blogged about here).

On the left is my blog entry about my Aunt Marianne. On the right are photos taken with my iPhone while we were in Cleveland with captions under them (one of the template pages available in the Blurb software).

On the left is a page from our Alaska book (which was about 4 times more expensive than the Blurb Book). The right is the same photo in the Blurb book.

I've done a couple of birth announcements this summer. Julia:

Lily's mom saw the birth announcement I had done for Lilly and asked me to do one similiar for her Lily who was due a few months later.

This blog has been idle for a while so now there are a bunch of little things to write about.

We've now been in our house for a bit over two years and it's finally starting to look like a home. For our two year house anniversary, we actually hung pictures. And we've finally been putting colors up on the walls (pictures maybe coming soon -- no promises). Our great room is now orange, and while I was at the Web 2.0 Conference, Chris surprised me by painting our kitchen the yellow I had picked out and bought months before. Our latest project is our bedroom which is finally not blue. The bedroom is still in progress, but we hope to finish it up soon.

On the work front, I'm changing positions. I'm moving over to dev instead of just supporting them. Chris thinks and change is in his future, but still working where he's working, just maybe for someone else.

Last weekend, I assisted Kerry with a wedding for a couple hours in the morning. Here are a few shots from the day:

One of my recent design project: Birth Announcement's for Lilly -- one of Kerry's clients. The photos are by K&R Photography:

I didn't like the direction that the blue themed thing was heading in. So we'll go with the eyes theme for a while. This one plays nicely across browsers and platforms. Enjoy. There are still a few tweaks I want to make, but I'm liking this better.