As I recently wrote in my monthly round-up email (sign up below if you haven’t already!), I’ve been listening to the NY Times podcast, 1619, based on the NY Times Magazine special issue published on August 18, 2019. This issue is a collection of essays/journalism examining how our present-day life, from our economy to the music we listen to, can be traced back to the foundation of slavery in America. While I’m enjoying and highly recommend reading (or listening to the podcast), in this tutorial, I want to focus on the cover design. The cover for the magazine (and the podcast art) features ..read more

Let’s say, you want to make a photo book of all of your favorite photos. But…..you’ve never had great luck at finishing a photo book. You start off really excited. Select some of the favorite photos from your vacation. Open up the design software but then you quickly become exhausted with creating the layouts for each spread. Or you get tired of using the typical layouts. It makes your photo book look more scattered than you want. So you give up. Which is so sad because these photos are documenting your vacation. And in my family, our summer vacation is the highlight of our year! Your photo ..read more

*This blog post contains affiliate links. By clicking on a link and making a purchase, Book This Project will earn a small commission. I only recommend products I use and highly recommend to make your photo book experience better.  During one of our summer vacation at the beach, we experienced our first King Tide. My mother-in-law explained that this is the highest predicted high tide of the year based on how the Sun, Earth and Moon line up. My daughter, who just finished her first grade year, was completely fascinated by this idea and kept imagining herself as a mermaid experiencing t ..read more

Usually, if I’m going to add text to my photo book, it’s going to be as a title on the page or a caption to a photo. But that doesn’t work for everyone. Some people want to incorporate longer pieces of text – such as long-form journal entries – combined with photos into a photo book. Recently, a reader reached out to me asking how to accomplish this using BookWright. While it can definitely be finicky, BookWright does have an autoflow text feature.  What exactly is autoflow text?  It means that there is one text that can be sub-divided into various text boxes throughout your entire ..read more

One quick and easy way to make your photo book look more intentional is to have custom designed divider pages. If you’re including these pages in your photo book, I recommend having them stand out from your other pages with design elements, text and/or color. However, I also understand – you don’t have a lot of time to customize these pages. It’s one of the reasons I’m creating my Graphic Design Packs every month. These design packs will quickly introduce color or patterns on your pages, particularly the divider pages in your photo book. There are two ways to add color if you are using Blurb ..read more

Over and over again, I hear from people that what makes designing a photo book so difficult, is selecting photos. Even if I design a custom photo book for you, you still have to select the photos, right?!?! So it’s important to get over this hurdle and find a way to make selecting photos less of a chore and maybe even {gasp!} enjoyable! When I first heard that Marie Kondo was translating her very popular book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, into a Netflix show I was excited. I read her book when it first came out but tidying up always comes in waves for me. I’ll make progress over se ..read more

Disclosure: Some of the links below are affiliate links, meaning, at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase.  One of my goals this year is to flex my graphic design muscle. It’s been a while since I’ve focused on how color, font styles and patterns can come together to customize a photo book. And with everything in life, one only improves with practice.  So this year, every month I’m creating free graphics – that includes color jpegs + CMYK values, font ideas and several patterns – to help “dress up” your photo book. My g ..read more

My computer is a tech dinosaur. Toward the end of 2017, it was taking entirely too long to do anything so I decided to move my photos completely off of my computer and onto an external hard drive. Fast forward to the end of 2018, one evening I set my laptop down a little too quickly. The next morning, my external hard drive was not turning on. Immediate panic set in. Of course, I have a back-up system. Several years ago, I had a similar mishap and set up multiple back-up systems. In fact, I now have files in so many places it’s hard to know if it’s duplicated or quadruplicated.  Yet, my ..read more

Recently I listened to a Revisionist History Podcast with Malcolm Gladwell titled “Free Brian Williams”. While the podcast starts off describing the moment in 2013 when David Letterman asked Brian Williams about the helicopter convoy he was on in Iraq ten years earlier. During his answer, he claimed that he was on a helicopter that was shot down….but it turns out, he was actually on a different helicopter that arrived on the scene of the ambush an hour later. This lead to him eventually being fired from the host of NBC Nightly News and he was excoriated in the media for lying. However, Gladw ..read more

If you’re looking to make a photo book this year, now is the time to start thinking about it. The earlier you get started – and start making decisions – the better off you’ll be to actually finish a photo book in time for the holidays. Imagine spending a little bit of time here and there working on your photo book over the next few weeks so when January 1st rolls around, you’ll be able to place your Christmas through New Year’s Eve photos into layouts and then print your photo book. Sounds nice, right?!?! All it takes is a having a game plan that you can follow step by step. Today, I’m shar ..read more