Coffee Table Photobooks: A Mixbook Review

We’ve been working on painting the office over here and we went for the bold… but it’s not quite finished yet. Thank you for all of your comments and suggestions!

Here’s a little peak though at this year’s Mother’s Day presents for Liv’s Grandmas. I know it’s a couple of months past Mother’s Day but photobooks are the new photo-chronicling method here in the Spenla household and it’s the greatest. I’m working on huge, over-sized hardbound coffee table books for each year (how neat will that be with just a giant ‘2009’, ‘2010’, etc on the front of each) and made smaller versions highlighting Liv (pregnancy through 3 months or so) as a special present.

Here it is displayed at my mom’s house.

Mixbook makes it really easy to assemble a photobook quickly. As an avid Photoshop user, I’m skeptical of the photo editing capabilities of any photobook program, but I’m pleased to say that I happily edited nearly all of the photos for this book right at Mixbook.com. Furthermore, Mixbook allows you to pull photos from your computer or Facebook – so genius. No double downloading necessary.

They offer a range of templates and designs but you can probably predict that I went with all black and a blank slate. I prefer designing my own layouts and it’s rare to find a photobook program that allows you to do that. You have complete control if you want it.

For this book I went with a simple, classy layout – solid black background, one giant 8×8 photo rimmed in white per page, just a bit of text thrown in for context.

After reviewing the program and ordering a book to check out, I’m a huge fan and I will definitely be using the site again. Especially after nabbing one of their awesome GroupOn deals! Use this promo code at Mixbook: PEPPERMX20 for an extra 20% off.

I’m the worst at falling behind on photos and scrapbooking, so I’ve found that it’s easiest to start one of my year-long photobook projects in January and finish pages once a month as that month goes by. Soon I’ll be ordering my giant book for 2010 and it will be a great way to share memories with all of our visitors – and something special for Kev and I to flip through as the years go by. Yeah for helpful organizing solutions!

How do you store and organize your photos?