All about Printing and Photobooks

I've got my 365 pages and Beijing book printed, so this post will be all about printing and photobooks!

365 Half-Monthly Pages for 2014

These were printed at Persnickety, and I loved them! I bought a pre-paid package and it was so worth it, much more affordable than I can get them here in Singapore, even including postage.

The photos don't do them justice, the colors were beautiful, and the clarity and details were fantastic!

Here's how they looked added to my Project Life album in 12x12 pockets.

The size of the half-monthly photos are just right, not too small and big enough to see the details!

And finally, my entire 2014 in one album binder - just perfect!!

Actually earlier I thought a lot about what I would do for 2014's memory keeping. My main concern was that my storage space is limited in my smaller new home, and may not be able to accommodate even one PL album binder each year in the long run. But I love my current process and can't think of any other way I would want to go about it, so I'm continuing with it for this year! :)

Lined/Graph papers used:

Rebecca asked me in the comments what are the background papers I used in these pages: Well a lot of designers include such papers in their kits nowadays, so I use various, but I especially love Allison Pennington's 'Patterns & Backs' and 'Ledgered' packs, and Digital Design Essentials' 'Noteables' and 'Notebook Essentials' packs.

Anniversary Photobook 

I've finally completed my 20th Anniversary Photobook. The first 19 years' pages were posted earlier in this post, and here is finally the 20th year:

I've also added a few more themed pages to the album, this one is about us being Beach lovers, or beach bums :)

About the institution of our date nights over the years

About our families

and life long friends too

and finally a last page - some of our hair and fashion misses in the past - what were we thinking??

So this is love :)

Re-hashed my valentines heart shape template for the cover

Here's the back cover

You can see the entire set of my layouts for my Anniversary Album here!

Beijing Photo Book

I received my Beijing Photobook back from Shutterfly!

As usual, it is lovely and the colors are brilliant. I'm so used to Shutterfly and have not been disppointed, so have stuck to them though so many other printers are out there. I guess I'm just lazy to try to figure out how another printer's program works!

Having said that, my friend Jenny had highlighted that when she printed recently, even though she followed Shutterfly's guidelines on dimensions, when her book was printed, there was a dark line near the spine on the cover. With her warning, I tried increasing the width of the spine jpeg to 1.573 inches (shutterfly's guideline is 1.437 inches). This is the result:

If you look carefully, you will see there is indeed a very thin dark line where the cover bends when you open it (where the cover design and the spine design meet). It is not obvious, but is there. I'm not sure how to solve this either. I might try increasing the width even more on my Anniversary Album when I get it printed and see how it turns out.

There is no such dark line on the back cover though.

Overall, the book looks just great, exactly how I imagined it would when I was designing the cover!

Here are some of the inside pages so you can see how the double pages show up. I'm still using the method I've always used, of allowing about 3/8 ths of an inch overlap on the left and right side jpegs that I upload (see more explanations here and here) and it has so far worked for me. Bear in mind though that my album is 98 pages!

In this page below, as you can see, if you have text running across the page, it gets quite tricky to be able to get the words lines up and be able to read them. Mine turned out okay, but there was some slight overlap - I was prepared for it and did not mind. But if you are particular, it would be best not to journal across the the page!

One more album added to my lot. This sight makes me so happy!

Hawaii Pages

And I've gotten started on my Hawaii trip photos! Always a thrill to start a new project.

Process

For this photobook, to simplify and to unify, I've decided to use only background papers that are wood themed. So before I started, I searched through my hard disks and copied all the wood-themed papers to a folder on my computer named 'Hawaii papers and embellishment's. Similarly searched all my stash for beach/hiking/hawaii themed kits and copied them to the same folder. Now I'm ready to roll!

1st page is on the evening right after arrival in Honolulu, where we went for the free Kuhio beach hula show. It was December and the weather was fantastic, not to mention the sunset, the music, the performances and the amazing feeling that we are in Hawaii!

The next morning we went to hike Diamondhead

At the peak - oh the views! And when we came back down, we tried the shaved ice - interesting as back home we have a local traditional Singapore version called ice kachang that we thought was original to us!

Then we spent the afternoon on a more isolated section of the beach - on the sand again - but on the other side of the earth! - how amazing

These templates can be found in the store at 20% off for 3 days only!

Also on this trip we transited in Korea, and spent 13 hours in Seoul - our first time - it was fascinating - we must visit one day!

This template is now available as Template Pack 9 in the Store. Thanks for your interest!