Tying the Knot: Our Guest Book

I originally posted about our guest book as a Guest Post for Syndal while she was getting married to the love of her life but for anyone who missed it (and to keep my own blog up to date about everything going on with my own wedding) I thought I'd share it here too!

The Guest Book

After attending the wedding of some close friends, I knew almost immediately that I would want to create a photobook using our engagement pictures to have for our guests to sign and send us words of love and encouragement. Then I got our pictures from our photographer and fell in love with them. I literally couldn't keep myself from designing said-book ASAP and am so, so pleased with how it turned out.

I read many reviews about different online sites to use for projects like this taking into account price, book size, customer reviews, return/exchange policies incase something went wrong, coupons. You name it and I researched it. I knew that this book would be something we had for the rest of our lives and I wanted it to be perfect.

With all that said, I happily chose MyPublisher and I am absolutely thrilled with the results. The minimum size for photobooks from them is 20 pages and that's how many we ended up having. I didn't want to spend extra money (I'm cheap, what can I say) and knew it didn't have to be very long to get the job done. The cover is solid black, linen finish and it's gorgeous. Inside the front cover I picked a textured gray and all their books come with a vellum overlay before the first page.

They have tons of layouts to choose from depending on the number of pictures you want per page and how much physical space you want the pictures to take up. The quality of the photos is absolutely stunning, seriously these pictures do not do them justice. Even the black & whites turned out amazing.

I specifically designed some pages to have more white spaces and some to have less and emphasize the pictures instead. We're not having a huge wedding and with families/couples I estimated that we'd have enough writing room even if it wasn't on every page. The layouts allowed you to pick one of their standards and then customize them to exactly your liking. (ie photo dimensions, location on page, etc)

To create a little uniformity to the book I repeated some of the layouts on different pages and I loved how their site was super user friendly. One of the things I liked best was that from running list of pictures to be used, ones that were placed in layouts no longer appeared. We had over 100 photos from our photographer and some were extremely similar with just minor changes in expression/angle/etc. This made it super easy to be sure pictures weren't repeated and to eliminate ones that didn't make the cut.

I picked the standard pages (versus the lay flat pages) because I was worried with how the center binding would be affected. I had read that some of the lay flat pages messed with the alignment of pictures and ended up cutting off essential parts. And I definitely didn't want that! Of all the pages I only had one (see below) that was slightly cut off and too close to the center. But I'm almost positive that was my user error and not a printing problem.

The end of the book is a solid white page (perfect since we're using it as a guestbook) followed by a little company logo and an odd barcode. I was sorta confused to see that but thankfully it's small and in the back. There's also another vellum sheet and the back cover has the same gray texture as the front.

I am by no means associated with MyPublisher other than the fact that I am a very pleased customer. They did an amazing job with the printing, putting the book together was a breeze and I was even able to use a Buy One Get One Free code and give my mom a copy of our book to keep for herself. I cannot wait for this to be displayed at our wedding and have it for the rest of our lives to look back on such an important day. 

All images taken by me, engagement pictures taken by Josh Barrett of Ignite Images