I was recently introduced to the company Artifact Uprising by my dear friend, Jess. She mentioned she loves their photo books, and I’ve been dying to find a company I can get on board with for all of our personal photos (of which there are MANY) – so I thought I’d check them out! (Remember the Lift List I wrote over a year ago?? See #18.)
So I checked out their site… Beautiful! The books looked stunning, and I loved their philosophy (Off your device / Into your life) and environmental policy! It is so true that so few of us actually PRINT photos anymore. And I can’t help but wonder – what happens when we’re gone? Those photos sit on Facebook and Instagram for all of eternity? What is there for our children and grandchildren to page through?
I want our kids to sit down with all these photos we printed, and books we made in their laps – and see how we lived our lives. I want them to feel something about their family. About our legacy. I want them to be moved and inspired. I want them to see where they came from and how we lived back in the ‘olden days’… 😉 And unless we make these memories available – that isn’t going to happen. (It’s doubtful they’ll go through my blog and Facebook page 100 years from now… right?!)
So – I’m over the moon happy that I’ve found an awesome company to make this a reality! Photo books! From our personal photos! Amazing!!
Here’s what we made!!! (You upload your own galleries of images and then design your book using different page templates they have to choose from in their in-site design suite – which I loved! Super quick & easy to do!)
The first was a 50-page hardcover book (square 8.5″ x 8.5″ with the partial dust jacket over the “parchment” color cover) that I used to tell the story of our trip to D.C. for the Inauguration in January! I’m not going to lie – I had envisioned this BIG FAT coffee table book (I think because a lot of the examples they have on their site are big fat books) – so I was surprised at how thin it was for 50+ pages… but I love it none-the-less! The pages are matte (not glossy or lustre), and the photos look pretty true to color (although I thought a few were a bit dim/faded compared to the originals – but who knows – that may just be the matte look).
Next up was a softcover 6″ x 8″ 40-page book that I designed to tell the story of our proposal! I didn’t have enough photos to fill all 40 pages, so I actually wrote out the story to correspond with the photos on the opposite page (which is awesome that you can add text to pages too)! I’m so excited to have this story saved somewhere to re-read as we get older! 🙂
Last but not least is a little 5.5″ x 5.5″ softcover book of ancient Chloe puppy pictures! Okay – not really ANCIENT – but from her first 4 months with us in 2011. It’s fun to have little puppy Chloe in a book to look back on, and I hope to print more with current photos. Especially because these were taken on our crappy old Android phones before they had Instagram available – so the image quality itself is pretty terrible – and that doesn’t have anything to do with the print quality or books! That is just crappy tiny phone photos for you!
So that’s it! What do you think?! If you’ve been itching to get some photos into books – I’d definitely recommend Artifact Uprising! The books are really great quality and have some beautiful cover options! Another company I love for Instagram prints is http://printstagr.am/ – which we’ve used as well for individual prints & loved the quality of them as well!
However, I wouldn’t personally suggest using these books for wedding photos. Maybe it’s just me – but I like those in bigger, thicker, archival books, and appreciate the option to design the entire book from scratch for my couples – not using pre-set templates.
But for personal photo books for birthdays, vacations, and other stories from your life – I say go for it! 🙂
