
This time last year, after I finished my first year of Project 365, I wanted to have hard copies of all my work. There's something about having your photos in hand, you know? So I took advantage of a deal for Snapfish printing through Flickr and put them in albums from Aaron Brothers, hand writing my notes for each day.
Bad idea. The prints from Snapfish were absolutely terrible - I should have known better from the cheapo pricing! They weren't even all exactly 4x6!
So this year, although I still favor the idea of having it all in my own writing, I decided to do something different. I tallied up the cost, and by going with a printed and bound book from Blurb I saved quite a bit of money over last year. I've made several books through them now and absolutely loooove the quality and ease of use. Far and away better than Shutterfly, in my opinion.

I used their Booksmart program to design it, because I wasn't feeling up to the challenge of doing it in Photoshop or In Design. :) But the great part about the program is you can use their templates and tweak them however you want, and you can use your own fonts. I went with smalltypewriting (one of my all-time favorites) for the page numbers and titles, and Pea Ninh for the day's description. That way it at least felt handwritten, even if it wasn't!

And because it's a whopping 251 pages, I went with a soft cover, which I hadn't tried before. Love the results! I also didn't opt to have the logos taken out, but if I ever wanted to sell books through them I could do so.

I had a free shipping coupon from a Christmas gift order, so that's why I went ahead and ordered it already. And I'm SO glad I did!

The grand total came to $62.95 + tax. A steal, if you ask me. I feel like a professional or something! ;) And I'm really considering going back and doing one for 2009. I think it's worth the investment.
What do you guys think? Any questions? Have you had success/failure with Blurb or another printing company?
xo
P.S. You can see the entire year of photos on my Flickr, and you can preview (and order, I think, if you're that crazy) the whole book here.