Jennifer Fox Designs: Photobook

Happy Saturday everyone! Terra here with another Saturday School topic for you. Now that I have created quite a few layouts I have started to research my options for printing. Once you decide the size you want to print (often 12"x12" or 8"x8"), there are generally two options - printing professionally bound photo books or printing single pages and adding them to an album.

Photo books are great for a commemorating a special event or if you are a chronological scrapbooker. I know I would love to create a wedding photo book and a book to celebrate my baby's first year, just to name a few! But for the most part, I am not a chronological scrapbooker so photo books intimidate me and I have been looking for other solutions.

I really like the idea of creating albums similar to the albums that traditional scrapbookers create. They look very durable as printed pages are protected by page protectors and pages can be reorganized whenever necessary. There are a variety of albums on the market with different covers and binding options to suit anyone's needs. There are traditional D-ring binder albums that are simple to use if you add/remove pages frequently. Expandable post-bound albums can be more time consuming to add/remove pages because you have to take the album completely apart to reorganize pages. I have heard that you can make this process easier by replacing the metal posts with a product called snaploads.

Classic 12x12 D-ring binder from We R Memory Keepers

As for vendors, I have heard a lot of good things about Persnickety Prints. I honestly can't remember hearing anything negative about their quality or service. They offer single prints, photo books, calendars and more.They currently have a deal on Facebook for 25% off of 12x12 prints. But hurry, the deal is only available to the first 300 customers.

Of course you may remember that Jennifer did a review on Lulu photo books a little while ago. If you missed it, you can check out her review here. Jennifer was very impressed with her photo book and gave them a great review.

Page from Jennifer's Lulu Photo Book

Shutterfly is another great option for either photo books or prints and if you take the time to look for deals you can often find a coupon on the web for a low priced photo book.

I hope that you have enjoyed this Saturday School post. Let me know what you thought of it in the comments. Do you print photo books or single pages? Have you used other vendors for printing your layouts?

Recently I was contacted by some really sweet people at Lulu. They offered me the opportunity to try out one of their photo books, share my review with you all, and even giveaway a free book to one lucky reader! I was so excited to have this opportunity! I love printing my layouts into bound books, love trying new printing companies, and love giving things away, so this was a win-win for me.

From Lulu’s website, you can read this information:
It's easy to create your own photo book online using Lulu Studio, our free online photo book creator. You can choose from a range of sizes, cover types and make use of our free professionally designed templates. Photo books are a great way to save and share your digital photographs instead of ordering photo prints. Convert your digital photo albums into beautiful, high quality printed photo books to keep, sell or share with friends and loved ones. Are you an artist publishing your portfolio photo book? A young parent creating a baby photo book? A newlywed making a wedding photo book? Or perhaps you are just feeling creative? Now you can publish and sell your photo book using our online tools. Lulu print on demand publishing makes it easy and affordable to publish and sell your custom photo book. Want to get it done quickly and easily? Lulu Studio makes it easy to use your pictures from Flickr, Facebook, Photobucket, SmugMug, or just upload them from your computer. Our photo books use a custom print on demand process and ship within 3 days of receiving your order. Buy in larger quantities to save money on each book you order.

Options and pricing: They have so many sizes of books to choose from. I love the “wallet books” that are 3.75” x 2.5.” How cute!!! They go all the way up to 13” x 11,” too. They have several sizes perfect for digital scrappers: 8.5”x8.5” (my favorite size) and 12”x12” square are perfect. A 12”x12” book with 20 pages starts at $49.95. A 8.5”x8.5” book with 20 pages starts at $19.99.

The Creation Process: Lulu Studio makes creating your book simple. You choose your book theme, add images, and off you go. You choose the layout you want for each page (for scrapbook layouts, I chose a full page), and then drag in your uploaded images. You’ll notice a dotted line marking the cut-off for each page. That’s very important and you’ll want to make sure that you don’t have anything important (photos, journaling, elements) in that area or it WILL BE CUT OFF in your final book. Even though I kind of knew that as I was creating my book, I didn’t want to resize to fit for each page and I did lose some detail in some of my pages. Leaving about ¼” from the outside edges is a pretty good rule of thumb. I could not find an option for creating a custom spine or title page, but neither of these was a big deal for me.

Book Quality: I love the cover of this book. It’s not shiny like most of my photo books. Instead, it’s a pretty matte with just a touch of sheen. I love that it’s different and it really is pretty. I was able to just use a layout for my cover (again, remember not to have anything important around the edges!), and it worked out just fine. The binding is nice and seems sturdy. The pages don’t lay flat when open, but that’s no different than my other photo books. It would just keep me from printing double page spreads very often. The print quality is very good. It is much better than Artscow and about even with Shutterfly. The pages are thick and the colors are great. No over saturation or dullness. The pages are vivid and pretty true to what I see on my monitor.

All in all, I’m very impressed with Lulu. Their customer service was top notch. Emails were answered in a timely fashion. Shipping was quick and packaging was great. If you are looking for a new photo book publisher, give Lulu a shot. I think you’ll be pleased.

Now, here’s the best part. Lulu has given me one 8.5”x8.5” photo book to GIVE AWAY to a lucky reader. How fabulous is that? If you’d like a chance to win, leave a comment here telling me what your book would include.

Would you like an extra chance (or chances!) to win? Simply do one or more of the following and be sure to leave each entry in a separate comment for more chances.

1. Follow this blog.

2. Become a fan of Jennifer Fox Designs on Facebook.

3. Subscribe to my newsletter.

4. Follow jfoxdesigns on Twitter.

5. Post about this giveaway on your Facebook page.

6. Tweet about this giveaway on Twitter.

You can get up to 7 entries to win this fabulous photo book!!! How fun! This giveaway will close at MIDNIGHT EST on JANUARY 31st. Be sure to check back then to see if you've won. Good luck!