My Printed 2011 Scrapbook

I had two albums printed by Blurb, and here I will show you the first one. The fun thing was that since I was ordering two books, I chose a different paper for each one so I could see the difference.

Here is the run down on the first book.

• Large Square book (12x12 inch)
• Hardcover with ImageWrap
• Premium Paper - lustre finish
• 148 pages
• Used Bookify to create the book
• Arrived in my hands in exactly one week.

I'm very happy with the book. It's beautiful. In the past my Blurb books have had a slight warp to them, but these two books were very flat. The Lustre premium paper had a very subtle sheen to it. It is definitely NOT glossy. I normally order the Matte finish premium paper. I think I like the Matte better, but it is really hard to tell the difference between the two. Visually, I can't tell any difference. But the Matte seems to have a smoother feel to my hand.

I was a little frustrated with the Bookify tool. The page layouts were very restrictive. Most of my pages just had a single large image on them (11x11 inches on the 12x12 inch page), but sometimes as I added additional pages to the book, that particular page layout just disappeared from my choices. I would have to go back to the page and delete the photo and then suddenly the large square page layout would be back. It was frustrating, but I always eventually got the layout I wanted.

I had one page that I wanted to just drop in an invitation and thank you note I had made - just place them side by side on the page. But Bookify wouldn't let me make my own page layout. I was completely restricted to their preformatted layouts, which really didn't make sense for the two images I wanted to put on the page. I actually had to go into Photoshop and place my 2 images on a white background, save the jpg and then upload that into Bookify.

Which reminds me of the third concern I had with Bookify. As I built my book, I would upload all of the layouts for a month at once and then arrange them in the order I wanted. But Bookify seemed to let the upload progress in the background without any indication of the progress. They were showing up in the book making tool, but I found myself wondering if it was really uploading the full resolution images. In the end I guess it all turned out OK.

Here are pictures.

I love everything about it! I'll share pictures of my 2012 book next week. Thanks for stopping by.