THIS GIVEAWAY IS NOW CLOSED
I’ve had two competing interests happening in my house for some time now and I’m excited to have a good solution – one that is going to benefit TWO readers of The Design File as well.
I’m on a kick to eliminate clutter in my living room. But I also have 2-year-old twin nieces and want to hang photos of them everywhere! Those two things just don’t go together.
Already I have a couple beautiful black and white photos of them hanging – one in the living room and one in my bedroom. But it just doesn’t seem to be enough.
Enter Blurb, a wonderful DIY book company I’ve used for several years to chronicle vacations.
So rather than hanging up too many photos of my nieces, I’ve now packed them into an 11x13-inch hardcover Blurb book, which is sitting on an antique music stand my Dad once rescued from a trash pile. See it above and see the back cover below (that orange arrow is part of the site’s preview mode, not part of the book).
It’s the perfect way for me to show off my nieces without cluttering up my walls.
Now, two readers of The Design File will get $40 coupon codes to make their own books. Thanks Blurb! (Get the giveaway details at the end of the post.)
What I love about Blurb is their books come out just the way you’ve designed them – no surprises on the layouts, no color casts and no page cutoffs that leave a border or word off the page.
Photography is a hobby of mine and so over the past seven or eight years, I’ve ordered photo books from several different companies, including a number of the most popular online sites. None – whether they’re hardcover, softcover or have a dust jacket like the one above – have turned out as well as the ones I’ve made at Blurb.
Blurb gave me my own $40 coupon code to make my book, which would easily have covered a standard square, portrait or landscape book. The latter is 10x8 inches and a great size for displaying beautiful photos.
I wanted something extra special, though, so I went for the large landscape size (see it open above), which starts at $54.95 for a hardcover with dust jacket. With tax and shipping, the total cost of my book would have been $61.94. But with my coupon code, I paid just $21.94.
I made the book using Blurb’s intuitive BookSmart software. You download it to your computer so you’re actually building the book offline. It makes the process of creating exactly what you want tremendously faster and easier.
Here’s how the BookSmart interface looks:
You pull in the photos you want to use (see them in the interface on the left), choose the page layouts you like (upper left) and then work on details like photo borders and text.
And you’re not tied to the preset layouts. As you can see in the photo below, you’re able to highlight any box and move it to your desired location. The program gives you a grid to keep things aligned correctly and warns you if you’re too close to an edge.

I liked my finished product so much, I made a slightly different version of it for my Dad as a birthday gift. I customized it by picking photos that included Dad, Mom and my sister and gave it a new cover and title.