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| 5x5 Mini Book by Persnickety Prints |
When Persnickety Prints ran a special for their 5x5 Instagram Mini book, I had just completed my fourth round of 30 Days of Lists and thought it would be great way to give this size a try!
The books specs are: as detailed on their website (here)
- Custom Luxe Mowhawk 120# Textured Eggshell Cover
- PUR Binding Technology
- 60 Pages
- 48 hour turnaround
What's not to love about that? I do like the feel and texture of the actual book. The cover and inside pages are all smooth creamy matte paper, and of good weight. My only worry is that we might leave finger prints or smudges since my cover is all white, Matte is beautiful but it does seem more 'fragile' than the hardcover glossy covers of my other shutterfly books. But at the $10 I paid for them, I'd say they are a great deal!
I will talk about the binding a little later on,
As for the 48 hour turnaround, I'm afraid my book went into some blackhole and it was nearly two months later when I received it in Singapore. I'm not sure what happened but I only checked in almost a month after my order and the status was still 'sent for printing'. After several emails that took more than a week, I'm relieved that the Persnickety team offered to send another copy to print, and I duly received it last week!
Interface:
I have printed lots of 12x12 layouts with Persnickety and they were always easy to upload and order, this was my first time trying out their photobook software.
I had first resized my images to 5x5, Uploading was easy as usual,
The photobook software was quite easy to understand, there were about ten layout options per page and you just drag your images onto the page. There are some basic text,background and photo editing options, but you should best edit your photos/images with photoshop or other software before loading it on.
Now let's take a look inside my book!
About the binding, as the book is small, and the pages do not open flat, after I flip them open for too many times, when I lay the book down like above, the cover will not lie flat anymore, that's why I used a clip for this photo. Not a problem at all, but just thought you might want to know :)
The colors are true to what I see on my screen and very pretty, as can be expected from Persnickety Prints.
I have to clip the book to a board to take these picture, as the book really does not open flat, but is fine for flipping through.
For the pages above, I had made my lists on my phone with apps like Over or Wordswag, and the words are perfectly sized in the 5x5 book.
For these pages where I had made my lists into layouts on my computer, because they were meant to be 8x8 layouts, I found that the words were a tad too small for my aging eyes to read comfortably! Point to note!
Because my layouts already had white backgrounds, these pages look seamless as the white border does not show up at all.
I had many different formats of lists as these were made at different times over a few years, but it didn't matter, I added divider pages indicating which month/year they were from, so in future I will be able to know the time context in which I made these lists/
The book is a fun size, would be great for a casual book of maybe selfies, or instagrams or a book abuot me for a child, makes a fun gift!
Even the black page below turned out beautifully
You have an option to add a picture to the back cover too, but I did not want to. The logo can't be removed from the back page as far as I can tell.
Here's a closer look at the binding and how the book opens.
Of course I must give a shout out for 30 days of lists, a journalling challenge organized by Kam and Amy a few times a year. I love their list prompts and the community, and have found them a wonderful way to capture some 'stories' about me.
Hope you have found this review useful! Any questions just put them into comments below.
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