Thursday, April 1, 2010

Year One: An Adventure in Bookmaking

As most of you know, I've been making a blog book of my first year in Japan. This was my first venture at making a book, and it was a big one: the final book is 174 pages!! Ideally I would have designed a shorter picture book to start, but it obviously makes the most sense to divide my time in Japan into two. The program I used was through blurb.com and it automatically loads in your blog entries from the internet. The pictures that I use on my blog are usually a lower resolution, so I had to swap them out for the original pictures on my computer and I also added more pictures from my trips around Japan and to Thailand last New Year's. The book shipped today, so I'm nervous if I'll be happy with the final product. I think it's a little cluttered, but overall, it looks pretty good and has a lot of memories that I'll be able to look through for many years to come. If you're interested in seeing the book, I've made it public for the time being, click on the picture below and you can browse through the pages. I probably will hide it from public viewing after a few months, so check it out now if you're interested!


4 comments:

Kelly said...

Wow, this is awesome. I wish I was a better blogger and could include text with my pictures. Good job!

Smiles said...

Holy crap. This is so cool! What an amazing thing to be able to make. I'm in awe & inspired. :)

ash said...

Thanks guys! I worked a long time on it but it was hard to edit as I couldn't print 174 pages at work, and I couldn't really have anyone else edit it unless they were on my computer! All in all, I think it will be a great keepsake...even if it's cluttered with a few too many pictures!! I'm hoping to make my second year book a bit more artistic and less busy. We'll see how that goes...

Katie M. said...

I love it! You've been so good about keeping up you blog. Like Kelly, I wish I'd been that consistent. I think you'll really love having this, 30 years from now.

I've been using Blurb too, trying to slowly put together a photo book of my year. If I ever manage to finish it, I'll totally share. :)