Semi-DIY Photo Guest Book

I quickly unwrapped the foam protection and revealed what was underneath:

Hooray—I love the way it turned out. The pictures are bold and bright, and the pages looked just like they did on the preview screens. I opted for their heavier paper stock and took advantage of a holiday sale where I got 20% off the book and free shipping. Since I had those coupons, I got their Standard Portrait size so I could get a little more bang for my buck. The only thing that surprised me was how thin the book is, and if you read to the end, I did a little pro/con of what I thought of Blurb. This is the best shot I could get of the book's thickness:


But with more than 30 pages in the book, and tons of white space, I'm not too worried about there not being enough space for our guests to write little notes here and there. And to help them out, on each page I wrote different writing prompts to get their minds rolling.

Okay, enough of my rambling. Do you wanna see the pages in the book? I tried taking photos of the actual book, but my camera skills were lacking, so you can see screen shots of the pages (there are 15 photos below, and if you want to read what's on them, just click the photo to enlarge).

















Yup, so that's our book! Now I can't wait for our guests to write us messages. I'm thinking of not having a guest book table and just having the book passed around during the cocktail hour and reception so people will have a little more time to sign more than just their name.

I wanted to give just a little Pro vs. Con with the Blurb book, because I know some people may be on the fence about whether they wanted to make their own book.

Pro:

• Extremely easy software to use
• Don't need to be connected to the Internet to layout your book
• LOVE the hardcover with photo right on the matted cover
• The pages seem very thick and of good quality
• The photos came out very high quality
• Very affordable and fast delivery
• They show you a preview of the first several pages of your book, which I think is pretty cool!
  

Con:

• I wish there were more layout options with the smaller books
• The "trim guidelines" totally freaked me out—I had several bleed pages and was afraid heads would get cut off. In the end, the only part of the book that was trimmed, I think, was in the gutter.
  
• The book, as a whole, is thinner/smaller than I thought it'd be for having 35 pages, but that's more of my fault than Blurbs
  

Result: All in all, I'm impressed with the book and will most likely use Blurb to make our wedding album (I'll just order one of their larger sizes—their book sizes are below). This particular book is the third one from the left.


Even though I'm impressed with how this one came out, I'm considering making another book with another company just so I can compare the two. I need to make another book (that you won't get to see till after the wedding, sorry!), so once I finish that up I'll let you know which company I'll use for our wedding album.