My book arrived!

[jfugina]

OK - today had very exciting mail from Shutterfly. My Disney vacation album arrived! WooHoo! I will say, I was a little nervous about how it would turn out, because these things are just so difficult to tell from a computer screen, and this book was NOT inexpensive. I downsized all of my layouts to 8x8 before I uploaded them, just so it didn't take forever, and Costco seems to do just dandy with 8x8 printed as 12x12. Well, it turned out GORGEOUS! I'm very happy, except for a few things that can't entirely be blamed on Shutterfly.

1. There is no explanation for this, except that I was just in too dang much of a hurry. As I went through the book, just on first glance, I counted 5 type-o's and/or misspellings. There were also one or two issues where a particular font didn't recognize punctuation, so apostrophes and dashes came out as question marks. Obviously, had I zoomed way the heck in and PROOFREAD my pages before uploading them, this could have been avoided.

2. I had a sneaky layer on one page. Right there, in the very center of the page, and on top of another photo, was a copy of another photo on the page. The copy was only a 2x3, but still, it's sticking right there on top of a photo of Jake (though not covering his face - I would have seen that). So that's disappointing. It wasn't one of my favorite pages, but still - DUH.

3. Lastly, and this one might kinda sorta be Shutterfly's fault - my custom covers are not at all centered. They are off by exactly the amount that was used to wrap the book board. Of course, that should have been completely obvious to me, and I should have accounted for that before I uploaded the covers. I uploaded 12x12, and that image actually needs to be more like 12.8x13.5 or something. And I did NOT figure this out from any information Shutterfly made available. I opened up one of the ScrappersGuide quick albums, and opened one of the cover pages and realized it was a different size. Next time I'll know better.

And while I say it wasn't inexpensive, I'll do it again, in a heartbeat. The quality of that book is amazing, and honestly, when I divide out the cost of that book per page, it comes out to less than $2 per page, and even that would make the cover completely free. I usually spend $20 on an album, and then when you consider the page protectors and the pages/papers and goodies and photo processing - all told it was a steal, really. If I did an entire digi album with a post-bound album from Michaels, and all of the pages printed at Costco, it would easily come out to over $200. This was around half that. And, my new space-conscious self is loving that this book takes up all of a half inch on my shelf.

[Becky]

That's awesome Julie! I'm really glad it came out well.
Would you say it took as much time to put together as a cut&paste album, or was it quicker?

[Becky]

Sometimes I even confuse myself - by "cut&paste" I meant regular scrapbooks as opposed to digital ones (I just realized you can cut and paste in digi as well! )

[jfugina]

I think ultimately, it was faster. And I don't just say that because I had it done in a month. I dedicated a whole lot of time to just this, since it was a project with a clearly defined end point, and I was anxious to see the final product.

That said, very few pages were more than drag and drop though. I'd say at least 3/4 of that book uses the ALSB digi layouts that used to come with the club scrap digi kits (basically a whole page that's already done, and just waiting for pics). I might have added a few things, like title alphas, or maybe a journaling box, but very little else. Other layouts I put together myself, but even most of those were done with templates. Once I figured out templates, things went a lot quicker. Too quick, I guess - that would be why there are all those type-os.

I'll bring the book on Saturday.

[Laurie]

Wow! do you think we could see a couple of those pages?

[jfugina]

About half of them are already in the gallery here. I've got the rest sized for upload - I just need to do that. I'll try to remember to get those uploaded tonight.

[LadyJaine]

I'm with you on the typos. I have to re-read things several times before I hit the 'post' button. On a digital page, when I'm dealing with layers and type, I have to re-read a zillion times before I save it. Spell check won't catch an incorrect word, like 'muck' instead of 'make.'

But it sounds like you are very happy with your book. I've been thinking a lot about the 'My Story' bookbinding tool that just came out recently from Provocraft. I hear it will laminate sheets as well as bind a book. Since I'm used to thinking of bookbinding as a process of folding and sewing sheets, the melting of glue sounds almost flimsy. But I also know that's the way the majority of our books are made these days.

[capescrapper]

Julie, I just got back from looking at the book in the gallery and it came out fantastic. I am glad you posted this because I do a lot of digi and was really afraid of getting a book done. And I think you are absolutely right about the cost and even the amount of time to do the actual pages. Well done and what a great keepsake!!

[jfugina]

Thanks Julie. I was mostly afraid about uploading the images as 8x8, but that was totally a non-issue. Now I'm just trying to figure out if I can convince myself to get out of that totally chronological rut so that I can do digi books more often. I love that they're so THIN! But I'm bound to have some paper scrapping too, which would have to go in a separate book - two books covering overlapping time spans??? EEK! LOL.

But yeah, aside from my own personal "goofs", it was fantastic. I am almost ready to RAK my entire ALSB nekid stash - that's how thrilled I was with this book. But I won't.. yet I'll see if I can do some serious hybrid scrapping this year to use up that stash. Doing a vacation album was great - I'm so glad I had a project like that to get me into the digi groove.

[EDelValle]

I did a book about my MIL to give as
gifts this past Christmas with Heritage Makers,
and I think I must have stared at each page about
a million times before I had the courage to hit the
publish button, but before I did, I asked someone else
to look at each page also.
We caught a few errors before printing, but I
think it all came out okay. I really like the way
it came out. For some pages I used images of
my paper pages as a full page photo and for
others I used their elements which are very nice.

[ChrisR]

Thanks for the review, Julie. I have been considering using them as well. Especially with our latest vacation. So far we have over 900+ photos, and our vacation isn't quite over. We go home tomorrow after lunch.

[bethrich]

Ditto, Julie, thanks so much for the information. I've been hesitant about Shutterfly.

[jfugina]

You're very welcome. A 12x12 book may even come out more gorgeous if you uploaded a 12x12 (no downsizing) - I don't know. I had to convince myself that ultimately it really was cost effective.

And Chris - I was kind of amazed at how great even the very small cropped photos look in the 12x12 size. You could definitely step up the number of photos on a page and have it look good, I think.