Monday, April 25, 2011

{blurb photobooks}


At our previous house in Silverlake, we had an entire wall of photos of our friends/family. I loved this wall and continually added to it while we lived there, but when we started talking about moving to a new place I knew I needed to figure out a better way to catalogue and display all my favorite photos. I'm not really one for scrapbooking, it is labor intensive and quite honestly, I am more interested in the photos than the themed stickers and colored paper that surround them. Chris found this amazing review of all the different photo book websites and after extensively reading through it I decided to create photobooks as a way to display all my favorite photos.


I grouped my photos into blocks of time and figured I would be making at least 8 books from the past 4 or 5 years.  Because of the amount of books I would be making, I decided on using Blurb's photobook service.  Although Blurb.com was not the top choice in the review I read, it did have really positive feedback and the prices are extremely reasonable for what you get.  Another selling point for me was the ability to have matte finished photo paper and a matte finished image wrap cover.



I was inspired by the clean aesthetic and simple color scheme of our Wallpaper travel guides (above) and decided to model the look of the books after these. My books are all the "standard portrait" option from Blurb with an image-wrap hardcover and matte paper. I also choose a very simple template for the interior pages that I carried through all the books, solid colored covers with only the title, black interior pages and only one or two photos per page all with white borders.  I am very happy with how these turned out and still have a few more books waiting to be finished. 






We keep these books displayed on our coffee table and I often find myself flipping through them. They bring me a lot of joy and I believe the time/money spent making them was well worth it.

5 comments:

  1. This is such a great idea! I used Blurb this past year. I took my husband's grandmother's home made recipes and put them in a book and gifted to the whole family (scored some serious brownie points) I scanned in her typewritten (w/ real typewriter) notecards with scribbles and her doodles. It was really special. I bet you could make a book of all your drink recipes and gift them to friends and fam.

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  2. I LOVE the design of these books! I have used shutterfly for the past 4 years to make books for the of my kids for the grandparents and one us as a "scrapbook" {I too do not like scrapbooking, but want to have the photos cataloged} but the books from shutterfly are not that attractive!! I think this is a great find... Thank you for sharing! I will be remaking my "scrapbooks" ASAP!

    Tiffany from {Living Savvy}
    www.savvydesignwest.com

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  3. what a great idea! I love how the books look displayed, so pretty! I've used shutterfly before because they have some great deal sometimes but after seeing your post, I will definitely be using blurb.

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  4. This is such a beautiful idea! Much better than scrapbooking ;) I love it!

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  5. i love this! we have so many photos, i hate to just have them on flickr, and who really has photo albums anymore? plus these just look great on your table. great find, i am totally going to do this soon!

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