We recently interviewed Inkubook member Abbey Wilson to find out about how she learned of Inkubook, why she likes us and she is incorporating photos, photo memories and photobooks into her upcoming wedding.

Engagement Photobook - Show off those gorgeous pictures

Inkubook – Tell us how you learned about Inkubook.
Abbey – I discovered Inkubook via the promotional Groupon deal this summer. I was not previously familiar with the company or the products, but frequently use Groupons to “test” new companies and businesses, so I thought this was worth the shot. I was also impressed with the simplicity of the website interface design when I checked out the site.

What made you come back after your first photo book order?
For “testing out” Inkubook, I hit the jackpot. I ordered 2 Classic Landscape books and they were printed beautifully. Not a single misprint or margin out of line – no pictures cut off and the colors I’d chosen printed exactly as shown on the website. I also worked with Inkubook Support to have their standard logo removed from the back cover, and the associate I worked with was kind and prompt in responding – 2 essential customer service qualities!

Was using Inkubook the first time you made a photo book?
I’d never made a “virtual” photo book until my experience with Inkubook, and I barely scrapbooked as a kid. I typically print pictures and slide them into blank albums, but Inkubook has changed my mind about how I want to display, share and keep my photographs.

Why do you like making photo books?
I like clean, simple designs and organized displays, and Inkubook photo books are perfect for this. I also like the simplicity of Inkubook’s “drag and drop” design, and the upload time for images is very fast.

Tell us about some of the books you’ve made?
The book I’m currently working on will be my wedding guest book. It highlights some of our favorite pictures from the time we started dating to our engagement, including our engagement pictures. I’ve designed it with small captions near each picture to tell our guests where each was taken, and left plenty of space on most pages for guests to choose a picture that they were present for or reminds them of us and sign their well wishes near it. The book is a nice touch to our wedding which is entirely personalized and unique to the look of most modern weddings.

Wedding Photo GuestBook

Did you use any tools outside of Inkubook in the creation process?
No, I just uploaded my own pictures directly to Inkubook and designed from the site.

We understand you’ll be getting married in May 2012, do you have any ideas in mind for using photo books and cards as part of your wedding planning and gifts?
As I mentioned, I’m creating our wedding guest book via Inkubook. I plan for this to be a beautiful display of pictures as well as our guests’ thoughts and comments we have for a very long time. I like the idea of customized thank you stationary, which we’ll also design for our wedding. Life’s too short to be boring – customization and beautiful design are essential, especially when planning a wedding! Inkubook gives you the potential to be anything but cookie cutter.

Congratulations to you and your fiancée on your upcoming wedding. Thanks for using Inkubook – we can’t wait to see your wedding album.

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Who doesn’t love the thought of a new baby? The teeny-tiny clothes? The soft blankets? The memories that come from seeing new copies of The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Goodnight Moon? During the standard two hours of a baby shower lots of “oohs” and “ahhhs” and “sooo cutes” are uttered with each gift opened. But equal to the oohs and ahhs is the amount of advice given to the mom-to-be from veteran moms in attendance.

Wisdom Photobook

Advice is sage. Advice is needed – parenthood is daunting. Unfortunately, spoken advice is often forgotten, especially when soft onesies, plush bunnies and humorous bibs are on hand. Therefore, I recommend making a Wisdom Photobook for the guest of honor.

How to make a Wisdom Photobook:

1. Be sure to take one picture of each guest with the mom-to-be.
2. Get a picture of the cake before it is sliced and the presents before they are opened.
3. Take plenty of pictures of gift opening, cake eating, games and socializing.
4. Give every guest am 8x8” sheet of light-colored scrapbook or wrapping paper and a dark marker or pen and have them write their words of wisdom, advice, top five tips or simply well wishes.
5. At the end of the shower, collect the sheets, scan and save as jpg images.
6. Upload pictures and scans and create a photo book where a picture of the guest and mom-to-be is on the left page and the advice is on the right page.
7. Mix in spreads of other images, apply borders and backgrounds
8. Proof your gorgeous book and then order it and present it to mom in the hospital when you go and visit the new baby or when you drop off a casserole at home (another great gift for new moms).

This book allows “mom” to remember one of her last social outings before becoming a mom and to glean advice from those who have already traveled the road of motherhood.

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Field trips make for some of the most fun and memorable experiences for kids. This time of year, a field trip to a pumpkin patch or apple orchard can transform a regular school day into an exciting adventure to see something new.

Wherever there’s an opportunity to make memories, there’s an opportunity to snap some pictures, so make sure to pack a camera to catch all the great moments of the day; or make it a classroom event by encouraging other chaperones and teachers to take photos too. You can even get a child’s perspective by giving one lucky student a camera.

Then, use everyone’s snapshots to tell the story of the trip in a photo book. With Inkubook, gathering everyone’s photos  is a breeze, and if you’re ordering copies for the whole class, be sure to ask about our volume discounts (this way, you can give one to the teacher for free).

Even though the point of a field trip is to learn (we won’t tell if you don’t), there’s still plenty of fun to be had. So pack some extra snacks, grab your camera and enjoy the outing.

Kindergarten Apple Picking

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Every family is unique with its own history, stories and, of course, the crazy family traditions. Through the years between birthdays, vacations and holidays, you and your family have accumulated enough memories to fill a book… Well, maybe that’s exactly what it’s time to do with your own family history photo book.

Old photo and letter, low res, but ok for history book

Let’s be honest, history probably wasn’t your favorite subject in school. Who actually wants to learn about the Industrial Revolution? But wouldn’t it be cool if the history you were learning about was your own? A book complete with decades of everything that is important to you and your family:

Genealogy: Now you finally have a place to record your extended family tree. An Inkubook allows you to show young generations when and where their great-great-great-grandparents came from and presents a way of discovering how you are all connected to your third-cousin Rick.

Stories: Nothing is better than the classic family stories. Record them all in one place, just the way your grandpa told them.

Photos: From the black and whites of your great-grandparents to last year’s Fourth of July cookout, pictures allow you to remember every special occasion and see how you and your family have grown.

Your family will not only enjoy and reminisce about all of the times spent together but will appreciate finally having it all in one place, one “Your Name Here” Family History Book.

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At the end of every school year, your child comes home with a school yearbook order form. Many of us give the money and buy the yearbook, as we probably still have ours from when we walked to school in 2 feet of snow uphill in both directions. And admit it, it is fun to flip through them from time-to-time and reminisce.

Seven-year-old building a photo book

Have you ever thought of making, or better yet, encouraging your child to make a summer yearbook capturing the little league games, swim lessons, pool parties, lightning bugs, backyard fire pit s’mores and more?

Call it a scrapbook, yearbook or photo book, it doesn’t matter, what matters is it will provide creative outlet for you and your child and, as a bonus, will prove the opposite of “we didn’t do anything fun this past summer”.

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From waking the unwilling troops and filling their bellies with a nutritious breakfast, getting them out the door with book-loaded backpacks and on the bus before it drives off to after school snacks, homework and extracurricular activities, the school week is often a cantankerous blur.

With so much going on, we sometimes fly right by the sweet, fun and amazing moments like morning bed head, science project building, first snow bus stop treks, and A+ spelling tests.

What if you were issued a challenge? A 180-day challenge to take at least one photo of your kids every day for an entire school year from the school’s-back-in-session blues to the school’s-out-for-the-summer beaming smiles. Between compact digital cameras and smart phone cameras, taking a pic should be easy.

When June arrives, you’ll have an impressive collection of the little moments that add up to big smiles, laughs and a few tears as you look back over the events and non-events that made up the past year. Just upload to Inkubook and use Autofill to make a school year scrapbook – easy, quick and lasting.

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Now’s a great time to make an Inkubook photo book. For a limited time Inkubook is offering new customers a free copy of their photo book with their first purchase. It’s pretty simple. Just create a free account. Start a new Inkubook project. Upload some photos or custom scrapbook layouts. Arrange them onto your choice of 100′s of layouts, backgrounds photo borders and more. Add some text if you like. When everything is just right, order your photo book and we’ll give you a 2nd copy of the same book free.  Give it a try. You’ll end up with one Inkubook to give to someone as a special gift and another copy to keep for yourself. Get the coupon code and the offer details on our website.

Have fun making something gorgeous! You will love the quality of Inkubook photo books. Don’t take our word for it though. Check out what our customers have to say on Facebook.

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Spring might not have officially sprung yet, but it’s not far off. Soon it will be time for gardening, soccer, baseball, Mother’s Day and graduation parties – all fantastic photo book-worthy occasions. At Inkubook, we’ve been busy getting ready for the spring photo book season by making several improvements, including enhancements like deleting photos from your photo gallery, working with text in your photo book, new photo book backgrounds & layouts and more.

To help launch you into spring, Inkubook has a sweet BOGO offer to share with you: Buy one photo book of any size or page count and get a second copy of the same photo book free!  With savings of up to $69.95, now is a great time to make a drop-dead gorgeous photo book. Make one as a gift and keep one for yourself!

Don’t miss out. This offer ends St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 2009. Just enter coupon code SPRINGBOGO during checkout to save some serious green! Offer cannot be combined with any other offer or promotion. Coupon code may be used one time per customer for one photo book.

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Well, it’s here, that part of winter that’s blisteringly cold and inhospitable. The time of year when it seems like going outdoors should be outlawed. One day the temperatures might be relatively mild, but the next is outrageously frigid. This is the type of weather that’s best for staying warm with a nice indoor activity.

Snow day memories can last forever in a gorgeous
winter-themed Inkubook photo book.

Call us predictable, but we’re going to give you a suggestion for an indoor activity, and you can probably guess what it is. When you’re snowbound (or just trapped inside because it’s significantly below freezing outside), it’s a good time to work on a photo book. With our collections of Winter and Contemporary Christmas backgrounds, you can pretend to be enjoying the seasonably cold temperatures without actually setting foot outside.

It’s a perfect time to organize your photos from the holidays and put them in a photo book adorned with our Contemporary Christmas backgrounds. As you can see from the swatches, the Contemporary Christmas theme says Christmas, but it does it by updating the look of traditional pine green and candy-cane red. The green is a little more muted and the red has more of a cranberry hue. Trees and ornaments have modern shapes and designs. If you prefer something a little more traditional, we still have the regular Christmas theme that includes more classic colors and patterns.

Inkubook Contemporary Christmas Theme

While it might be too cold to go sledding, ice skating, or snowman-building right now, it’s a good time to remember the last winter adventure you had by building a book with some frosty backgrounds. Designed with images and colors that evoke memories clear, crisp days full of sunshine and snow, the Winter theme looks adorable when framing photos of people joyously playing in the snow.

Inkubook Winter Theme

If the last thing you want to do is be faced with the imagery that makes you think of winter, don’t fear. We still have all the backgrounds that are reminiscent of warmer time, such as the Summer and Family Beach Vacation themes. You can turn your heat up to 88, put on a pair of shorts, sip a refreshing glass of iced tea, and focus on the history of last summer instead of the history of last month.

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Here at Inkubook, “We want to improve” is our middle name. Sure, it’s virtually impossible to fit on a standardized form, but getting better is important to us so we live with the inconvenience.

Getting better at what we do means taking the feedback we receive seriously. One thing that has come up often, both in responses to surveys we’ve done and in conversations you’ve had with our support staff, is that the full-page bleed layouts necessary to upload your very own scrapbook designs aren’t easily found. We plan to rectify that as best we can as soon as we can by making sure that the full-page bleed layout is available by default in the Layouts gallery. In the meantime, though, we’d like to give you some tips that might help you find it when you’re looking for it.

Currently the full-page layout for the 8.5″ x 8.5″ book is not in the Layouts gallery when you start a book. But we do have one. You just need to add it to your gallery so that you can place it on your pages. Here’s what you need to do:

1. Make sure you’re on a page of the book (not one of the covers) and click the Layouts tab.
2. Click More at the left end of the gallery. This will show you all the available layout options for this size book, and it looks like this: 
3. The full-page bleed layout that you’re looking for (one without any other photo or text continers) is in the second row, second from the left. See the picture below for the exact location. We’ve included a shockingly pink arrow and callout so you can’t miss it.
4. Click the layout then click Apply. It’ll be added to your Layouts gallery and will be placed on the active page.

Here’s where to find the full-page bleed layout in the 8.5″ x 8.5″ book.

In the 11″ x 8.5″ landscape book and the 8.5″ x 11″ portrait book, the full-page bleed layouts are a little easier to locate because they’re already in your Layouts gallery. There are two pictures below to show you exactly what you’re looking for.

This is where the full-page bleed layout is in gallery of the landscape book…

…and this is the location in the gallery of your portrait book.

You are now properly armed with the information you need to put your digital LOs (or scans of your traditional scrapbook pages) into a drop-dead gorgeous book.

Just so you know, one of the other bits of feedback we’ve received is the suggestion that we should create a feature that allows you to apply the same layout to every page. We think that’s a great idea. We don’t want anyone to get repetitive stress injury from having to drag the same layout onto every page of a book. This is a feature that we definitely plan to implement. In the meantime, we hope you’ll bear with us as we work through the list of all the things we want to do.

We’re standing by to hear more of your feedback, so please use our Feedback form to send us a note. Otherwise, we encourage you to get started on your book. If you make one that you’re really proud of and you’d like to share it with us, use the Invite Friends feature to send an invitation to ckughen at Inkubook dot com. If you give us permission to use it, your book might end up in one of our sample galleries!

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