A Week In the Life 2011: It’s Blurb-tastic

POSTED ON September 20, 2011 IN A Week In the Life, A Week In the Life 2011

Friday was an awesome day around here. Sure it may have officially been my little sister’s birthday (happy belated birthday, Alyssa!) but the FedEx man arrived with a special gift just for me…

…my A Week In the Life Blurb photobook!

And as promised, I am back with photos of my new prized possession as well as some final thoughts about my entire A Week In the Life 2011 adventure.

Having never ordered a Blurb photo book before (or any photo book for that matter), I’ll admit I was a bit nervous about what to expect. So nervous in fact, that I let the box sit unopened until Adam came home and made me open it, haha.

But I have to say, all my worry was for nothing, as the photo book is gorgeous. In fact, I think my response when I opened it was something like, “wow, it’s like I’ve been published!” Somehow I didn’t expect it to be so, uh, officially book-like, haha.

Here’s my AWITL photo book in all it’s hardcover glory. I went with the Image Wrap option which meant my custom designed cover is printed directly on the book and wraps around to the back.

I love love love it.

The first and last pages of the album are a really nice grey linen-ish paper.

I’m chose the Premium photo paper for my book and I’m so glad I did. You can definitely tell it’s photo paper – the pages are nice and sturdy without being too thick.

A look at one of the 10×10 photo spreads. These were the pages I was most concerned about because I wasn’t sure how the image would look being spread across the gutter.

I had seen directions online about how to duplicate parts of the image to fill the gutter, but there was a lot of variables involved (like page and book thickness), and no guarantee it would work, so I decided to instead make sure whatever part of the image that was in the gutter was non-essential. If I were to do this again, I might play around with it more but I think it worked out mostly fine.

If you look closely at the bottom of the photo you can see where the computer screen doesn’t quite match up but in person it’s a lot less noticeable than in this photo.

I did have one page where the text ended up in the gutter. I’m not sure what happened but I suspect the title moved when I was doing all my journaling and I somehow didn’t realize it. Lesson learned, definitely double-check that all your text is in that lovely grey safe area box!

If you open the page a little farther, you can see the end of the title, it’s just a wee bit closer than it should have been. Oops. Poor cutoff title.

On a happier note, this might be one of my favorite spreads. I really love that photo blocking on the left page.

A look at two of the highlights pages:

On the last page of the album Blurb included their cute little logo.

A little peek at the spine:

The back cover…

And the entire cover all together:

On the outside spine of the book, I included the title of the album and the date. I can totally imagine a bunch of these books lined up on a shelf.

A Week In the Life 2011: My Final Thoughts

Blurb Photo Book: Blurb definitely gets my stamp of approval. I’d heard a lot of horror stories from other scrapbookers who have printed photo books from other companies, so I wasn’t really sure what to expect, but the quality of the Blurb book is fantastic and the color and trim on the pages is totally true to what I saw on my screen. Plus using their PDF to Book InDesign Plug-in made the whole bookmaking and uploading process SO easy.

Photobooks in general: I definitely see more photo books in my future. I absolutely LOVED the clean photos + words format. I can see so many uses for it. I don’t see myself switching to printing my digital layouts in photobooks any time soon, but this project has definitely inspired me to tackle some of the photobook projects I’ve been wanting to do for awhile, like our wedding book and our year in Korea album.

A Week In the Life: I heart this project. A lot. Sure it’s a TON of work but the end result is so so worth it. Adam said it best – it’s like a time capsule of our life. And that is so so very cool.

Favorite AWITL moment: Adam’s dramatic reading of day one of my A Week In the Life album. If you think it’s weird to have other people read your journaling, try having them read it to you out loud in a dramatic fashion. Totally awkward and hi-larious.

More than anything, what I’m taking from this A Week In the Life 2011 adventure is this: I can do this. I can set out to do one of these major scrapbooking projects and actually finish it. Maybe not as quickly as someone else but as long as I stay focused, I’ll get there in my own time.

As someone who tends to leave behind a wake of unfinished projects, that is one awesome lesson to have learned.

What about you? Have you learned any awesome life lessons lately? Have you seen the photo book light like I have? Have any photo book adventures of your own to share? Feel free to let me know in the comments!

Psst…want more A Week In the Life goodness? See all my AWITL 2011 posts here.

Interested in creating your own album? Check out the Photobook Frenzy Photoshop templates in the shop.

A Week In the Life 2011: Bringing It All Together with Aperture & InDesign

POSTED ON September 15, 2011 IN A Week In the Life, A Week In the Life 2011

On Tuesday, I shared my completed A Week In the Life album (you can see it in all it’s photo-y goodness here). Now I don’t know about you, but I am always ~~curious~~ nosy when it comes to how people tackle large projects like this, so today I wanted to offer a little behind-the-scenes peek at how I put my Week in the Life photo book together.

Let me preface this by saying that this was my first attempt at creating a photo book so by no means do I consider myself a photo book expert. I’m just sharing what worked for me.

The tools I used:

Apple Aperture
Adobe InDesign

Yes, you read that right. No Photoshop.

Ok, well, that’s not entirely true. I did use Photoshop to run my most favorite Totally Rad “Lux” action on my big 8×10 and 10×10 focal photos.

If you’re wondering why I chose for this project to go with my first Adobe love, InDesign, over my old scrapbooking standby, Photoshop, there were a couple of reasons:

1) InDesign is designed for multi-page projects

In order create this photo book in Photoshop, I would have had to create a separate document for each page of my album. But because InDesign is built for multi-page print publications (think magazines, newspapers, books, etc), I was able to create one single file that included all 46 pages of my album.

Definitely WAY easier than keeping track of 46 individual Photoshop documents.

2) The Blurb InDesign PDF to Book plug-in

One of the reasons I chose to go with a Blurb is they offer a free downloadable PDF to Book plug-in for InDesign that creates a custom book template for you based on the size and number of pages you want in your photo book. And it includes all of the trim and bleed information right in the template so you don’t have to worry about parts of your text or images getting cut off. Plus you can save the entire file as a PDF and upload it directly to print. So so easy.

Now if you’re wondering if this means you need InDesign to your long digital goodies wish-list, the answer is NO. You can absolutely use Photoshop to create a photo book – lots and lots of scrapbookers do.

BUT if you’re one of those scrapbookers who happens to own the Adobe Creative Suite and has always wondered what you could use InDesign for scrapbookingwise, this post will give you a little overview about the awesomeness that is InDesign.

But before we get to InDesign, I want to talk a little bit about the first big hurdle for this project – the photos.

Part 1: Organizing Photos in Aperture

Over the course of A Week in the Life, I took over 750 photos. That’s a lot of photos! So I needed an easy way to select and edit my most favorite photos.

Enter Apple Aperture.

In another post I’ll explain more about why I’ve made the switch from Adobe Lightroom to Apple Aperture but for now, all you really need to know is that if I didn’t already love Aperture before, this project totally made me head over heels in LOVE with it.

After uploading all my photos from my Canon Digital Rebel XT, my Nikon P&S and my iPhone, I started organizing them in Aperture.

First I made a project folder for A Week In Life 2011 and added Smart Folders that pulled photos taken during the week divided by days:

Next I added a five star rating to all the best photos, being careful to limit the number of too similar photos:

Once I had my five-star photos selected, I created Albums for each section of my days (I called them Routines) and dragged the five-star photos into their correct albums:

My final step was to Flag the small number of photos I wanted to include on my page. These are the only photos I edited and exported as JPGs to use in InDesign. As I mentioned, I used Aperture to edit the majority of my photos. The only photos that went to Photoshop were the large focal photos so I could add a little extra punch to them with my Totally Rad Actions.

My flagged photos (which you can also see in the earlier photos but only because I’ve already done the project, haha):

I then repeated this process for each daily routine album.

If you’re wondering why I chose to mix the flags with the star ratings, the answer is personal preference. I liked that it was easy to see the flagged photos rather than trying to see the difference between say 3-star and 5-star photos. You could definitely do it a different way, this was just what worked best for me.

Writing it all out it seems like a lot of steps but it actually went rather quickly. For all you fellow math nerds, here’s a little numbers breakdown of the photos at each step:

162: Number of photos taken on Monday
99: Number of photos that received a 5-star rating
40: Number of 5-star photos which were moved to the Monday Morning routine album
8: Number of flagged photos for Monday Morning which were then edited and exported as JPGs
6: Number of photos that made it onto the final version of the Monday Morning routine page in the photo book

Because I already had my design planned out, I had to be pretty ruthless since I knew at most I could only have 7 photos per spread.

Once I had all my photos edited and exported, it was time for some InDesign fun.

Part 2: Putting It All Together In InDesign

I don’t want to get too detailed about how I use InDesign, only because, if I did we’d be here all day and this post is already getting long, haha.

But I did want to show you the highlights of how I put my album together with InDesign. So if you’re curious in knowing more about InDesign or would like some more specific details/questions answered, please feel free to ask in the comments section.

My first step in InDesign was to download and install the Blurb PDF to Book plug-in. You can find the plug-in here.

Once you have the plug-in installed, you’ll be able to go to the File menu and find the Blurb Template Creator, which will bring up a dialog box that looks like this:

There you’ll choose the size of your book and the type of paper you want (some paper is thicker than others) as well as the number of pages.

If you’re not sure how many pages you’ll need, don’t worry about it. You can always add and remove pages as you work. The only time the correct page count matters is when creating your cover so make sure you don’t create your cover until you’re completely done with your book (or at least 100% sure on your finished book page count).

Once you’ve inputted all your book information, Blurb will create a book template that looks like this, a two page side-by-side spread just like you would have in the finished book:

That main area is where you’ll design your pages and on the right side of the window, you have a list of all your spreads.

At the top of the page Blurb has included some bleed/trim information for the book. Here’s a closer look:

Included are are three sets of lines: one for the safe area, one for the trim area and one for the bleed area.

The black trim line represents the physical edge of the book pages while the big grey box is considered the “safe zone.” Anything important (like text) should go in that grey box as due to trimming inconsistences, Blurb can’t guarantee that anything outside that box will for sure not be trimmed. It shouldn’t be, but it’s a better-to-be-safe kind of thing.

The red outer line represents the bleed line. If you want your photos to bleed to the edge, aka no white edges, you want to make sure your photos go all the way to that red line.

In terms of designing the album, InDesign is a lot more simple than Photoshop in that you don’t deal with layers in the same way. It’s pretty much all boxes: either image boxes or text boxes.

The weekend prior to AWITL, I created two master pages (essentially templates) to serve as foundation pages for my design. This is what my two master pages looked like:

8×10 Focal Photo:

10×10 Photo:

haha, yes, those are our wedding photos. They happened to be in an easily to grab folder along with these other prints.

To create my pages, I simply replaced the photos (in InDesign it is MUCH easier than Photoshop to replace and resize photos into pre-done image boxes) and adjusted the image and text boxes based on the number of photos I had chosen for that portion of my day.

Let’s just say there was a lot of repetition in this project – duplicating spreads, replacing photos and adding new text.

As far as planning, other than the basic design of the master pages, I didn’t have all my pages planned out in advance. I just moved the boxes around as I saw fit based on how the overall album was coming together. One of the great advantages of InDesign is you can see ALL of the spreads at once and really get a birds-eye view of how it’s all flowing together.

Now here’s the part in the cooking show where I miraculously pull my pre-made finished dish out of the oven. *cue the wavy time-is-passing lines*

Here’s what my finished album looked like in InDesign after all the moving and replacing:

One of the finished square photo pages (if you look closely you can see how the big photo bleeds across the book spine and onto the second page):

A little bit more of a close up:

So you can see all my text is within that gray safe zone and all my photos bleed to the very edge where the red line is because I didn’t want any white space at the edge.

Here’s what the finished page will actually look like in the photo book (minus the grey background):

It’s kind of hard to tell from the screenshot, but everything outside of the black trim line has been basically “trimmed” to give a more realistic look of what the book will actually look like in print.

I haven’t received my printed Blurb book yet (possibly Friday!) so I’m not sure how much will really be trimmed off but I’m hoping it’ll be similar to this look. I’ll definitely be sure to share whatever happens!

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this ~~little~~ long peek into the inner workings of InDesign, Aperture and my A Week In the Life album. If you have any questions or anything, feel free to leave me a note in the comments section!

Psst…want more A Week In the Life 2011 goodness? See all my AWITL posts here.

A Week In the Life 2011: The Completed Album

POSTED ON September 13, 2011 IN A Week In the Life, A Week In the Life 2011

Woohoo, I have done it!

My A Week In the Life 2011 album is officially finished. In about 3 short days I should have a nice and shiny Blurb photobook arriving on my doorstep.

And I could not be more excited.

Not only because I’m absolutely in LOVE with the finished album but because for the first.time.ever I have completed an Ali Edward’s inspired project.

Yes, that’s right, unlike my previous attempts at December Daily or A Week In the Life, this time around, my AWITL album will not be sitting on a shelf or in a folder on my harddrive mocking me in all it’s unfinished project glory.

Cue scrapbooking happy dance.

I’ll be the first to admit this project was a TON of work. Between spending a week documenting everything, selecting and editing photos, putting it all together, journaling, well…there’s a reason I just put the finishing touches on this album in September.

But I am head over heels in love with the end result, so all that hard work? Totally worth it.

As I mentioned in my pre-AWITL planning post back in July, my plan for my AWITL album was to create an 8×10 Portrait photobook through Blurb which I would design using Adobe InDesign. And I have to say, that plan worked out swimmingly.

When I started brainstorming for my album, I knew I wanted the album design to be focused on words + photos with a clean, magazine style design and I also knew that I wanted to break my day into chunks (like morning, afternoon, evening) in order to simplify the documentation process.

But I wasn’t entirely sure about the exact design for my album until I came across this spread from an old West Elm catalog I had saved…

Not only did I love the clean design, the large focal photo and the fantastic use of type, but the theme for this particular edition of the catalog was exactly what I was looking to do with my AWITL album. The catalog was broken up into daily sections, with each spread themed around the idea of what furniture and accesories would be perfect for that part of the day (above is Saturday afternoon).

So I chose to use that page as inspiration and run with it for my album.

So with that in mind, I bring you my 2011 A Week in the Album…

2011 Completed A Week In the Life Album

Below you’ll find the pages from my AWITL 2011 album. Each image represents a two-page spread made up of two side-by-side 8×10 pages. Since the spreads are rather small in order to fit on the blog, I’ve linked each image to a larger image on my Flickr account, in case you want to see the details or journaling.

Just a bit of warning, Adam and I are pretty awesome so try not to be too jealous of our super exciting life (and slankets), haha.

Cover + Intro

This may just be my favorite page from the album. Clean blocked design, yes please. It really brought everything all together.

I included our location, along with the date, on the intro page because, as a military family, where we live changes so often that it’s kind of necessary to document it, especially considering had I done this project in July 2010, we would have still been living in Colorado.

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Saturday

Sunday

A couple of notes about the design:

Some days have more spreads than others, with a max of three spreads per day (morning, afternoon, evening). I didn’t plan which days would have more spreads ahead of time, it really just came down to which photos I felt told the whole story over the course of the week.
It’s hard to tell without the page break line but the large square photos spread across two pages.
I used a consistent accent color, pink, to tie all the spreads together. I’m not usually a pink girl but for some reason here I liked it.
All the journaling is themed around time. I didn’t document the time as I went – I just used the time stamps from the photos and rounded to a nice number.

Highlight Pages

At the end of the album, I included some highlight pages that document some of the broader themes from our week, like food, clothing, etc. I figure it’ll be fun to look back on these pages years from now and ~~remember~~ laugh at all the things we use that no longer exist, haha.

Weekly Highlights: the journaling on this page came directly from a set of lists I kept in Evernote during the week. I loved the idea of capturing these items now knowing one day some of these items/brands will no longer be around.

AWITL Fashion: One of my goals for the week was to take a daily photo of myself in the mirror. I’m sure this page will be one of those that I cringe at years from now which is partly why I wanted to include it, haha. I mean, could you imagine if you had a page like this from high school? It’d be craziness.

AWITL Food: A simple list of the food we ate during the week. Again, I kept track of all this in Evernote so I just had to copy and paste it into InDesign.

AWITL Technology: A look at some of our most used tech stuff. I figure it will be funny to look back someday at what technology was considered “cool” in 2011. The future generation will probably be laughing at this page from their flying cars and in-brain computers, haha.

On the last page I included a little summary about who we are and what this album is about. It would have been a great intro page as well but since Blurb requires the first and last pages to be single pages, it worked better to include it here. I think it’s a nice little ending to the book.

And that’s my A Week In the Life 2011 album! In the end I ended up with 46 pages and I’m super thrilled with how it turned out.

This was my first attempt doing a photobook and I absolutely loved the simplicity and clean design of this format. Definitely something I’ll be doing again!

Lessons Learned from the Week In the Life 2011 Process

So what lessons can I take away from my first completed A Week In the Life album?

1) Having a plan is key

Having a clear design and plan before the week started made things SO much smoother.

Not only did I know what types of photos I needed (like the big focal photos) but it freed me up from feeling I had to capture every moment of every day.

2) Go with the best tools for the job

I’m sure I could have put together this album in Photoshop but using InDesign made it so much easier, especially when combined with the Blurb InDesign plug-in.

3) Take more detailed notes during the week

Next time I’d love to do more in-the-moment journaling rather than just keeping lists. Plus, trying to remember all the details a month later is tough.

4) Schedule time to complete the album

My biggest mistake this time around was underestimating just how much time and work it would take to put the album together. Next time I’d like to schedule time for working on each section of the album so I guarantee I can finished it in a reasonable amount of time.

5) Keep things simple

I know myself well enough to know if I tried to scrap all the pages for this album in my signature paper-lovin’ scrapbooking style, the album would never get done.

Which is exactly why I chose to keep things simple this time around. No fancy scrapbook products. Just words + photos. I LOVED it.

Having a clean, well-designed finished album definitely beats the pants off of an unfinished but super detailed scrapbook album any day.

A Week In the Life: Done and Done

And that’s it for my 2011 Week In the Life album!

By far my biggest take away from this project is I am actually capable of completing one of these major projects. That’s a pretty big exciting step for a girl who gets really excited about projects like this but then FAILS in the execution of them.

How about you? Did you learn any fun lessons from your finished (or unfinished) A Week In the Life album? Anything you would do differently? And is anyone else convinced like I am that Ali Edwards must have scrapbooking elves who come in the night to help her complete these projects? I love her projects but man are they a lot of work, haha.

If you have any questions about my album, please feel free to ask those in the comments section as well.

A Week In the Life 2011 Sneaky Peek

POSTED ON August 25, 2011 IN A Week In the Life, A Week In the Life 2011

Hello everyone! Did ya miss me? My apologies for being a bit MIA on the blog front this month.

In addition to putting out some awesome new products this month (which you can check out here & here), I had to take a bit of a family emergency trip back to California last week when both of my grandmothers ended up in the hospital.

While it was great to spend time with my family, it was a pretty stressful trip overall – the kind that makes you feel like you need a vacation to recover from your vacation.

But the good news is things have finally calmed down and I’m ready to jump back onto the blogging and scrapbooking bandwagon.

Which is why I popped in today to show you a little peek at what I’ve been working on the last few days…

That’s right. I am in full on A Week In the Life album creation mode around here. Sure it took me a few extra weeks to get to it but better late than never, right?

As I mentioned before, my plan for my AWITL album was to keep the design really clean and simple and focus on just the words and the photos and I have to say, I am loving the result.

I’m getting really excited to see the finished product, which considering I only have the journaling and a final overview page to go, I’m hoping that will be in the next day or two. So be on the lookout for future post with all the juicy details of my AWITL adventure sometime next week.

So what about you? Anyone else still chugging along on your AWITL album like me? Anyone finished their album and want to share? Feel free to share your AWITL thoughts and links in the comments!

A Week In the Life 2011 In Photos

POSTED ON July 29, 2011 IN A Week In the Life, A Week In the Life 2011, Life Adventures

Five days in and still going strong…

I heart this project.

A Week In the Life 2011, Nettio Style

POSTED ON July 25, 2011 IN A Week In the Life, A Week In the Life 2011

Welcome to A Week In the Life week, Nettio style!

If you’re a fan of Ali Edwards like I am, you probably know that today marked the first day of Ali’s 2011 A Week In the Life project.

For those of you who haven’t heard of A Week In the Life before, AWITL is a seven-day documentary project designed to capture your everyday life through words and photos. The idea is rather than focusing on the big moments like birthdays, vacations and holidays, you spend a week focusing on all the little details that make up your everyday, regular, routine life.

I’ve attempted A Week In the Life twice before, once in 2008 and once in 2010 and in both cases I took photos and notes for a few days, got bored/burnt out with the process and never made it to the scrapbook album portion of the project.

2010 was especially difficult for me because Adam was deployed at the time which meant my days, evenings and weekends tended to blur together in one big pile of sameness. Some people would argue that the whole point of AWITL is capture those same routines and while I’d agree to a point, there were only so many days I could handle taking yet another photo of myself emptying the dishwasher, haha.

But the truth is I LOVE this project. L-O-V-E.

The completed albums I’ve seen from other scrapbookers make me want to complete an album of my own in a bad, bad way. There’s something so magical in embracing the everyday and especially because Adam and I are at a point in our lives where a lot could change in the next few years, I love the idea of taking this time to document our life right now.

So when Ali announced a few months ago her plans to do AWITL the last week of July, I made a commitment to myself that THIS would be the year I complete this album.

And this weekend, I came up with a plan…

1) Focus on documenting this week, album next week

Ali recommends separating your documenting from your album process and I’m going to follow her advice.

Originally I liked the idea of working on the album while the stories were still fresh but I also know myself well enough to know that it would be WAY TO MUCH for me to do everything at once.

So this week I’m taking photos and notes and next week I’ll be putting my album together.

2) Begin with the end in mind

In the past when I’ve done AWITL, I went into it figuring that once I had all my photos, I would work out the design.

This time around I decided to do things differently and sketched out a design plan for my album already. Right now I’m liking having the constraints of a planned design because it’s giving me a better idea of the types of photos I need to take throughout the day while still giving me the flexibility to the capture the stories I want.

As far as my design plan, right now I am to planning to do an 8×10 Portrait photo book through Blurb which I’m going to design using Adobe InDesign. I’ve never done a photo book before so that part kind of scares me but I’m excited to have the chance to brush up on my InDesign skills, haha.

It’s definitely going to be a much more clean, magazine style design than you usually see from me but I am really really excited about the design.

It’s all about the words + photos.

3) Break my daily documenting into chunks

One of the more overwhelming aspects of AWITL for many people (myself included) is the idea that you’re trying to document every day for seven days in a row. Can we say burnout by day three?

I made the decision this time that rather than trying to document my entire day every day like I have in the past, I would break my day into four chunks: Morning, Midday, Afternoon, and Evening and focus heavily on one or two of those chunks each day.

My reason for doing this is two-fold:

One, it will allow me to really focus in on capturing certain parts of my day without feeling the pressure to capture everything.

And two, since my weekdays tend to be pretty similar from day to day, I’m hoping this will keep things fresh throughout the week as I won’t be documenting something I’ve documented the last four days already.

There are a few things I will be documenting every day like clothing and food, but since this decision was partly influenced by my album design, I’m comfortable knowing that while you won’t see everything everyday, you will get an idea of our daily life over the course of the week.

4) Use Evernote to document my week

I’ve recently jumped on the Evernote train and will be using it to capture my journaling/notes for this project. I love that I can add notes from both my computer and iPhone and they automatically sync.

In Evernote, I have an A Week In the Life notebook that has eight notes in it: one note for each day of the week for documenting those day specific notes (schedule, routines etc) and a note named Weekly Faves where I will be documenting ongoing themes throughout the week. Right now my Weekly Faves list is broken up into these categories:

Food
TV Shows
Places We Go
Technology
Brands
Clothing
Websites/Apps

My plan is to compile the Weekly Faves lists into a two-page spread that will serve as a round-up of the week.

I have to say this may be one of my favorite aspects of my album design not only because I was able to fit my “faves” obsession into this project, haha, but because I love the idea of mixing daily and weekly themes. If my lists become really long, I may limit them to a top-ten list for each category but for now I’m writing down anything we do that falls into these categories.

5) Download my photos off my camera every day

While I’m not going to be focusing on creating my album this week, I am going to upload my photos to my computer every night/morning. Not only will this give me a better idea of any photos I still need to capture but it should help me avoid the OMG-too-many-photos moments that always come when I work on a large project.

So that’s my current plan for tackling A Week In the Life. I’m sure some things will change as the week progresses but after today I’m feeling really good about my design and plan for this week.

Anyone else doing A Week In the Life project of your own this week? Do you have a plan or are you winging it as you go? Feel free to share your plan or lack there of in the comments!

Nettio Designs

Design + Creativity + Adventure = LOVE