The books arrived! I think I have done better this time around, say, the credit goes to better camera, and lesson learnt not to resize and discard original image files.

I love consistency, or rather, I can be obsessive about consistency. I enjoy immensely by looking at the uniformity when the books are displayed on the bookshelf.

Blurb offers more alternatives in book-making now. I have tried my hands on the inDesign plugin (download from Blurb’s site), and it really works better if you want to spruce up the creativity in the page layouts. The booksmart application (also downloadable from Blurb) works fine, but if you are doing a thick book with many images, and large format separator pages, the application may crash; not if you are using a powerful machine, that is.

My old iMac (since 2007, and now a hand-me-down to the husband who will have 1 windows operating desktop + 1 iMac + 1 iPad + 1 notebook!) couldn’t handle the heavy duty process and crashed on me several times; although Blurb says that the application auto-saves your work, trust me, some crashes are more devastating and there is not enough time for auto-save.

Noticed the change in color of background from white to grey? Our wedding book (at the bottom of the stack) is spotting due to the high humidity in Singapore.

Good thing that Blurb is now offering premium quality book-binding technique and papers, and it is so affordable to print with them, I might just make another wedding book! Oh well, now that I have years of practices in book-making, I might make a better wedding book. Ha!

Lesson learnt:
Overly protective behavior can cause more damage – I kept the books in plastic wraps and stored them in the enclosed shelf (with see-through glass door). The problem with the insanely high humidity in Singapore is that mold may start to form in poorly ventilated areas. We never had problems with the books before until we bought a new enclosed bookshelf.

Now the books are back in the open shelf. I’d rather clean the dust than to have the books yellowing and spotting. That said, I decide to go with the grey color background anyway.

I print the photo book by year, by consolidating the trips into the same book. For that reason, I create separator pages (using several design and photo editing softwares) for each trip.

A simple separator page can be easily done by choosing a full bleed layout in Blurb built-in application, edit the layout and add more image placeholders and text.

I take notes during vacation; and record whatever matters to me every or every other day during the trip. I find it helpful to capture the details during the trip and not to procrastinate. Unless you have photographic memory, you would want to scribble the funnies, the crazies, the oddities etc on the same day when these events are still fresh in memory.

You will be surprised at the small details that fizzle out within short period of time.

So people say that a photo says a thousand words. I say, words say the exact words. We don’t really capture everything, unless you are doing a reality show or have a camera stuck onto your head 24/7. We tend to miss out some funny details that happened so fast, too quickly to be captured on camera.

I fill in the gap between the images with words; the husband tricked me into watching a puppy pooped in the street, it happened very quickly and my astonishment didn’t help in fishing out the camera in time to snap a photo too. This funny event is recorded in words, and will not be forgotten.

Then, there is the end page. I always include an image, but this time around, I have included a hand-sketched image of our love story. The kitty cat was added at the last-minute as the husband bugged me about it and injected the guilt factor, ‘where is our cat? where is our cat?’.

I include a short expression on the end page, mostly relative to what has been learnt during the year, especially during the vacations. You know how vacations can turn out so differently from what we have set out to do!

Tip (journal pages):

1. Cast the sketch – preferably in high-resolution of min. 300-350 DPI, and larger dimension (resizing is possible later) – onto transparent canvas in design software such as illustrator or photoshop.

2. Save the image as PNG format (which is one of the acceptable file format in Booksmart).

3. Select a text layout (depending on how much you are writing, there are various text layouts to choose from)

4. Turn on the guide for bleed and cut-off zone, ‘Edit’ the layout to add an image placeholder – bottom left/right, or top left/right.

5. Save the layout as ‘left journal’ (or whatever makes sense to you)

6. Repeat the steps, but this time, mirror the image to the opposite side.

7. Drag the finished sketch image into the image placeholder; resize and position as you wish.

Optional: If you only want to have one format (i.e. right page), you can always try to manipulate and arrange the pages in a way that the journal page will fall on the right side.

Preview – use the preview feature to see if everything falls within the bleed and cut-off guideline. On blurb preview, the PNG image may appear fuzzy but the print will turn out fine, so don’t be too worried about it.

On the back cover page, I am more inclined to select a sunset or relaxed expression. I also include a short text expression about vacations and travels. Honestly, my views towards vacations and travels haven’t changed much, so I am running out of expressions. Perhaps I will include the country-specifics on the next print!

I am so glad that in spite of my crazy work schedule (which is now booked till April 2012!), I managed to get these 2 books printed. Now, we can really start afresh!

We are leaving for our Anniversary Vacation on 19 Jan, so it’s work work work before we can let the hair down!

Have a great year ahead!