Yesterday, July 20th, Brian and I celebrated 10 YEARS of us and had a picnic at our favorite place with some bubbly and yummy snacks! (view the post here ) A whole decade ago he asked me to be his girlfriend and SO much has happened ever since then. We got MARRIED (during year 7), lived in 5 different places together, bought the very house where he asked me out in the driveway, adopted a bunny and our baby dog, went on MANY vacations and trips together, celebrated 10 years worth of holidays and festivities, and made so many everyday memories in between all of the big stuff. As you can probably imagine with me being a photographer and someone who loves to document life, we have L O T S of photos together from everyyyything! I always had this idea in my head that I wanted to somehow gather every photo we’ve ever had and keep all of those memories in one book. I have a few smaller photo albums that have random pictures in it that I printed out and were some of my favorites but the order is all mixed up and they don’t truly tell the full story of us. About 2 months ago I had the thought in my head that our 10 year dating anniversary was coming up and THAT was a great time to finally make this book!
This thing was a labor of love! It is intimidating enough to make a photo book of ONE years worth full of memories with the amount of photos that I take, and I was about to put together TEN years. Yikes, but I was so determined and knew how much I would love this thing once it was in my hands. I have a pretty solid system for how I back up and store my digital images so that helped a lot! Maybe one day I will share my system for organizing my photos because it has worked great for me! So in order for me to go in full chronological order of everything, I pulled up my Facebook page and went allllll the way back to July of 2010 and started working my way to the present day. I have my image files named with the date on them but it was a lot easier to follow a timeline in a way to see when everything took place, and then I would pull those images from my hard drive of the events that happened, and upload them into Blurb’s design program!
I have had Blurb on my radar for a few years now and I actually have a few photo books that are started but not completed yet. I was on the hunt for a company that had good quality photo books but also didn’t cost an arm and a leg. I first came across Blurb I think on Pinterest and I researched the heck out of them! I have always loved the idea of having “family year books” every year that had all of our memories from that one year in one book, and that the images were off of our phones and not living on Facebook! I started our 2018 and 2019 family year books , and I also our 2017 Honeymoon book too, but like I said, I never fully completed them yet. So I already had an idea for how to make our “10 Years of Us” book. Blurb has a program where you design your pages and layouts and one of the main things I decided to go with Blurb for my books is how easy it is to create layouts, and also how customizable they are! You can literally drag and drop photo boxes anywhere on the page and create layouts that are not already in the standard list! You can also make the photo boxes any size you want by pulling the edges of the box! There are template pages that you can use to make it easier for you, but I think all of the pages I have in this book were custom ones I created.
There were two options for the covers, a hard cover with the photo printed right on the book (which is what I chose), or having the photo on a dust jacket. For other sizes of books there is also a softcover option, but not for 12x12 which is the size I got for this book. When this thing came in the mail, I was SO impressed by the cover! The photo was tack sharp, the coloring was spot on, and the overall quality of the cover is SO nice!! I can tell this will hold up for many years! I also love the wording on the spine and looks so good sitting on a shelf! I can’t wait to have a huge collection of books all sitting next to each other! The wording, font and placement on both the covers and the spine are also very customizable and you can move it where ever you want!
Also, the paper is really nice quality!! There are 6 different paper type options you can choose from but since this was my first book and I knew how BIG this was going to be, I just went with the “Standard” option which is the least expensive. It actually is VERY good quality for being the standard option!! I was thinking the pages might be a little thin like a magazine but they are actually pretty thick! Not too glossy, and the coloring on them looks very close!! I was very impressed!
Here are the main details about this book :
Size: 12x12
Cover: ImageWrap Hardcover
Paper Type: Standard
Pages: 220
Images: 742
Cost: $140 (I saved $56 dollars with a sale they had of 35% off, they have sales ALL the time!)
Turnaround Time: I ordered it on July 8, it shipped on July 13, it arrived on July 14! VERY fast! (I paid $23 for the fastest delivery option so it would arrive on time for our anniversary on the 20th)
Like I mentioned above, there are 742 images in this book! SO many memories that I will cherish forever! I also wanted to point out that this book is probably 90% iPhone photos! I do have a few spreads of images with my DSLR camera but most of my memories were captured with the camera that is on me pretty much at all times. And they turned out GREAT!! That was another thing that I was really impressed by was the quality of the iPhone images! Here are a few spreads to see all kinds of layouts that I created and that you can do!
I didn’t date and caption every single photo and memory because I would still be here making this book haha! I put a date for major events like when we went to prom, vacations we went on, the date our niece was born, our wedding, etc.! I also made sure to label when each dating anniversary came up and made those dates a little bigger so they would stand out through out the book.
Font I used: Droid Serif
Size for anniversary dates: 30 pt
Size for everything else: 12 pt
I am SO in love with how this turned out and this has definitely gave me a kick in the pants to finish the books that I started, and to print out as many years as I can and start my own collection of photo albums!! This has become one of my favorite objects in our home and I can’t wait to see what adventures and memories our “10 MORE Years of Us” book will hold!
