Make Your Own Wedding Album with Blurb
A friend of mine recently told me about Blurb, a website that provides you with a book making software that you can download and create your own book. After your layout is complete, you can order a copy of that book starting at $12.95. What is great about Blurb is that it comes with designs for different types of books, but you can also mix and match from the list of templates provided to create a unique book of your own. They print full page bleed (image will run to the edge of the paper) and offer a choice of soft or hard cover.
Since we have the pre-wedding photos, we thought this would be a great way to create albums for our grandparents and even a parents album. Our package only includes 1 parents album so I’m definitely going to play around with Blurb to create another. It’s cheaper than printing it with the studio and my friend said the quality of the book is very good (it was recommended to him). I’m thinking of incorporating baby photos as well as pictures from our graduation and our travels.
The only thing I didn’t like is that you can not move the picture or text boxes in the program. I’ve done a lot of desktop publishing and graphics design for work so I wanted more flexibility. There is a way around it though. They have a lot of examples of published books on their website so have a look and get inspired.
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Comments
Hi Xiaobee,
Thanks for mentioning Shutterfly. I’ve taken a brief look in their gallery and some of their books looked really nice. They have a lot of different covers options. Which one have you used so far?
Hey Jan: So far I have made 2 8.5 X11 books, one suede cover, one vinyl cover I believe. The cover has a little window in the center and the picture from the title page will show through. I made one for all of our pictures from last year, including our cruise vacation! The full page pictures of the sky and water turned out really good.
I’ve also made 8X8 books, with a full bleed picture on the cover, both with shiny covers (it’s really nice). You can also put a picture on the back cover (I can’t remember if it can be full bleed though). My friend’s 7X7 book from blurb has a matte finish cover which she liked.
Hi Jan! My friend has used blurb. One of the downsides is that you have to work on your book offline and then upload the album when you’re ready to print. Unfortunately, you can only see the first 15 pages online so you really have to trust that everything uploaded ok and your album will be what you think it is.
She also said the faces of people in her last 7X7 photobook were too red. Blurb has said they will be using another printer to print the small books so hopefully the problem will be corrected in the future. I haven’t seen her book so I don’t know.
I’ve done a few photobooks with Shutterfly for myself and for my friend and we have been very happy with them. I even made 2 photobooks of our pre-wedding photos (8X8 size). Once we get our wedding day photos back, I’m going to make 2- 8.5X11 books for our parents!
I just love talking about photos!! haha!