Family Yearbook

 

For a long time, hubby and I talked about making family photo books instead of an individual “baby book” for each child. This year, we finally did it.

I’ve mentioned before that hubby is a cartoonist (we make most of our living through the sales of his books). He also has a book layout business on the side. He uses Createspace for all of his printing, so when we wanted to do our family photobook, using them was a natural choice for us. There are definite pros and cons to going with Createspace over one of the “drag and drop” photo book companies.

Pros

* The price. Our books are 38 pages, full color, and only cost $3.65 each (plus shipping, of course). That’s the price for up to 40 pages. The pricing above 40 is still very affordable though. And black and white is even cheaper; that starts at $2.15. The $3.65 price is the minimum, and there is a 24 page minimum through Createspace because all books are perfect bound (standard paperback binding). For small run printing, you can’t beat them. We know – hubby researched book printers for a year before finally going with Createspace.

* The freedom. With a drag and drop company, you’re stuck choosing their templates and hoping your pictures fit.

Cons

* The freedom. Wait, you already said freedom. Wasn’t that a “pro”? Yes. But if you don’t have any graphic design experience, it’s a con, not a pro. Because Createspace is aimed toward “real” books, they don’t have any prefabricated templates to use for your interior. You have to build all the pages from scratch. They do, however, have prefab covers you can use. I was able to build the interior myself, with just my crude understanding of Photoshop, but fortunately for me, hubby has a much better handle on the program, so he was able to build us a custom cover. That’s what you see above.

Here are a few of the spreads from our book:

 

 

Pardon the black boxes; the real book has the kids’ names in it, but I didn’t want to post those here on the blog. And because of the way it’s saved, going in and making a quick change to the text wasn’t possible. But you can see what I mean about the complete freedom in our design. No two pages are quite the same, and we were able to include our own little “articles” and captions. Being on my high school yearbook staff back in the day definitely came in handy for this project! The methods have changed in the past 14 years (!), but the concepts are the same.

I ordered one copy of the book a couple of weeks ago – a proof copy – so we could look through it and make sure the pictures printed as well as we hoped they would. They did! Now I have three more copies scheduled to arrive here next week. One will go to my mom and stepdad, one to my dad, and one to hubby’s dad and stepmom for Christmas. We also ordered one for hubby’s grandma (we stayed with her when we were on vacation back in July), but we had hers shipped directly to her; we figured it was better to pay shipping once instead of twice (once to have Createspace ship it here, then again for us to post it to her).

I couldn’t be happier with the results of our 2013 family yearbook! I’m super excited to do one of these every year now, possibly more often, depending on how many pictures we have.

–Wendy