Wedding Book - Blurb.com

Posted on June 11th, 2007 by hanfaith.
Categories: General.

It’s been a busy month - between my Mom’s graduation, Éva’s ballet recital, my parents moving in with us, family visiting, sewing dresses for my cousin’s wedding, and getting ready for our vacation in the Adirondacks, I haven’t had much time to myself! One of my priorities this month, however, was to finish a project I’ve had on a back burner for quite a while.
Our sixth anniversary is coming up in a week and a half, and as a present to each other this year, Phil and I decided to finally scan in our wedding pictures and put together a book. After doing lots of research on the best photo book sites, I finally ended up at Blurb. Their software is downloadable, and the book is assembled offline before uploading to their website. I love having that option. There’s nothing worse than waiting while uploading 100s of pictures to a site before you even know if their photo books are what you really want. Blurb lets you chose from three sizes - 7×7, 8×10 (both portrait and landscape), and 11×13. The books can be either softcover or hardcover with a beautiful dustjacket of your own design.

Perhaps what I like best about Blurb is its ability to be customized. I made a photo book at shutterfly last Christmas, and was constantly frustrated that I had no option to shrink or stretch a picture to fit the picture box the way I wanted it to. Blurb gives me this option, as well as much better picture and page layouts. This software would be perfect for the everyday person to assemble a cookbook (actually… this would work perfect for the ever elusive RMFO cookbook :lol: ). There are a myriad of text and picture layout possibilities.

Like Lulu, Blurb lets you set your own price and pays you the difference when other people order your books. The prices are quite reasonable… actually, their much cheaper than most photo book sites. The 7×7 hardcover wedding album that I designed with 40 pages costs around $22. Not bad at all.

I could go on and on about this software. It has a lot of possibilities, and their full color bleeds are beautiful. If I had more time to invest in a project, I’d do full page layouts in photoshop first and then import it into the software. The software also can “slurp” blog posts to make a beautiful book of your blog. Really nifty.

I highly recommend this company. The software was intuitive, the preset photo layouts were well designed, the prices are excellent, and it’s fun! Try it out.

Click the link below to see a preview of our book (or order it yourself if you’re so inclined! I haven’t added anything to the price, so it’s not expensive). Hopefully the link will show up on your browser. If not, surf on over to blurb.com and search for “Our Wedding” or “Hanfaith” and it should turn up. I wish the preview showed the dustjacket as that’s really my favorite part. Pardon the bad quality of the pictures - that’s not blurb’s fault at all, but rather the fault of scanning in photographs that aren’t all that great. My next photo book will be made from pictures from our digital camera - can’t wait!!