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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Getting married soon? Consider a wedding guest book with personality – your personality.

Real Simple, Martha Stewart and The Knot have a lot of great ideas from simple and fast to complex and time consuming for unique wedding guest books. Our suggestion is to get personal by building a wedding guestbook photo book.

Personalized Wedding Guest Book

Many betrothed couples had gorgeous engagement photos taken and those that didn’t likely have a vast collection of photos from your time as a couple.  A photo book guestbook is the perfect way to show those sharing your special day with you the great times you and your fiancée have shared.

For most weddings a 20-page book is sufficient for capturing the well wishes and signatures of your guests. Start by collecting 10-20 of your favorite photos. Decide what size book you want to make (we suggest 8.5×11 landscape or 8.5 square) and select a hardcover, so the book will lay open well while your attendees write. We suggest placing images on left facing pages (and the covers) and while you’re placing photos, add borders and captions if you like. Place the guestbook templates on the right facing pages. Our guest book templates are found by clicking on Backgrounds within the editor (be sure you have your book open to any page but the covers). In Show located on the upper left of your workspace, select Specialty – Romance – Wedding. Within the wedding section, you’ll find Classic Guest Book, Modern Guest Book, B&W Classic Guest, Modern Words of Wisdom and Black Guest Book.  Choose the one you like best and place on right facing pages. On your cover, we recommend a great picture of you as a couple as well as your names, wedding date and the words “Guestbook”. Be sure to proof your book and while it only takes 2-6 business days to print and then another 2-6 to deliver, you should place your order at least three weeks before your wedding (longer if you’re having a destination wedding) just to be safe and to lower your last minute stress.

Congratulations on your upcoming nuptials.

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With autumn just around the corner, your schedule will start getting jam-packed with weekends of football and fall festivals, as well as homework, Halloween parties and the list goes on. So, why not get a jump start on some holiday card and gift making and lower your stress level when it comes to crunch time.

Holiday cards - easy

Photo Cards are fast and easy to make, bring a smile to the recipient’s face and aren’t just for the December holidays. Make Halloween party invitations, Thanksgiving family greetings and New Year’s wishes too.

If you’re going to make holiday cards, think about when you’ll want them to arrive at your family and friends homes, how long it’ll take you to address them and then order them 10 days before that. Have in mind the pictures you want to use – or still need to take and decide the background you want to use. Once you have the picture and background selected, you can make a beautiful card in about 10 minutes.

Photos organized by holiday

Photo calendars make a great gift. They arrive right at the end of the year and will bring smiles to Grandma’s and Great Aunt Dawn’s face each month.  If you’re planning to make a calendar whose images matches celebrations that typically occur in certain months, like Halloween for October, make the process of laying out a calendar easier by putting photos in buckets such as holidays, birthdays and other events like family reunion, vacation and playing in the snow. This type of categorization will allow you to apply pictures to the appropriate month. Other calendar themes could be a year of family fun time, baby’s first year, wedding and so on.

Layout for October

Get creative and have fun.  Like cards, remember to order early to allow for you gift wrap and deliver to the recipient – beat the rush, don’t get caught in weather delays and keep your holiday stress down.

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Let’s face it, the tried-and-true, stand-in-a-row-and-smile style wedding photos are nice to have, but do they really capture the personalities of you and your better half?

With a wedding album from Inkubook, you make the call on what shots go into your own album. And you get to personalize it in ways that your average album just can’t accommodate.

Tips for Making Your Personalized Wedding Photo Book

• Never worry about yellowing, fading or loss: Clip your wedding announcement from the newspaper and scan it to include in the photo book. Do the same with other paper goods, such as your save-the-date, invitation and program. See if the best man and maid of honor are willing to give you their hand-written notes from their toasts, too!
• Experience your big day from another angle: Ask friends and family to include their email addresses in the guest book; then invite them to upload their snapshots so that you can include them in your book.
• Don’t miss any special moments: Ask a friend or family member to capture candid moments – the tiny groomsman and flower girl napping in the corner; you and grandma cutting a rug to “We Are Family;” the happy couple driving away in their decorated car.
• Give it the 3-D feel of a keepsake scrapbook by scanning small items such as the bride’s garter, the groom’s tie, a flower from the bouquet, lace from the dress, etc.

Other Ways to Use Inkubook for Your Wedding

Use our Great Big Square style in place of or to supplement the traditional album with a more personalized Inkubook.

Put together photos from your engagement shoot for a guest book that you’ll actually want to display after the wedding day.

No matter where you plan to go, your first trip as husband and wife is sure to be memorable. Capture the excitement in a honeymoon travel book.

MORE IDEAS

• Create unforgettable thank-you gifts for parents, grandparents or members of the wedding party.
• Think ahead to the first anniversary. Start uploading photos from your honeymoon and other more basic snapshots that will remind you of your first year together.
• No wedding coming up? No problem. Gather old wedding pics and mementos and create an anniversary album for parents or grandparents.
• As an alternative to a wedding slideshow, compile all your favorite and funniest photos of each other into a Mini Brag book that you can incorporate into your table centerpieces. Buy as few as 10 copies and you’re eligible for Inkubook’s volume discount of 15%.

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We see hundreds of wickedly creative drop-dead gorgeous photo books every day at Inkubook. Lately we’ve noticed by the number of personalized wedding guest books being made that wedding season must be coming soon. One wedding guest book that really caught our attention was one created by the blogger of  Budget Savvy Bride. 

With permission from her talented Franklin, TN-based photographer Evin Photography, the Budget Savvy Bride used several gorgeous photos from her engagement shoot to create a custom-designed wedding guest book on Inkubook. The finished book was amazing. This bride-to-be definitely has style. She opted for a non-lined design allowing her guests to write messages freely throughout the book.  Flip through her Inkubook photo book widget below to get some ideas for your own wedding guest book or pass it along to a friend on Facebook or MySpace who might be getting married this year. Just click the “Get Widget” button and follow the directions.

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When I got married a couple of years ago, I did a lot of my research on the Internet. It never once occurred to me, though, to specifically look for wedding blogs. Boy, am I sorry I missed out. I have since become much more familiar with the world of blogs, and I’m constantly impressed and awed by all the good information that turns up. So I decided to highlight a few wedding blogs that have recently come to my attention.

Snippet & Ink

Bear in mind that this collection only scratches the surface of the wedding blogs that are out there. You can pretty much find a wedding blog for any type of wedding you’re planning. Working with a budget of less than $2000? There’s a blog for you. Not interested in the traditional white or ivory and going for a specific theme like goth or all pink? There’s a blog for you, too. As time goes on and we find other interesting wedding blogs, I’ll give them a shout out here.

First is Snippet & Ink, a blog of daily wedding inspiration that’s been around for at least a year. Had I seen this blog with its beautiful inspiration boards and Real Wedding Saturday posts when I was planning my wedding, I probably never would have made it down the aisle. I would have been too conflicted about deciding which gorgeous idea I wanted to pursue. The little birds used in Deanna & Jesse’s wedding are just killing me. I want to have a whole flock.

Brenda’s Wedding Blog

Then there’s Brenda’s Wedding Blog, which is run by the owner of BestWeddingSites, a compendium of wedding-related resources. As on Snippet & Ink, Brenda features photos and details from some real weddings, and she has some fantastic suggestions about planning events. I love her recent series of posts about planning wedding-related events around a cupcake theme. She even has a directory of where to find cupcakeries. It makes me jealous that I wasn’t more imaginative when I was doing my own planning.

The last blog for today is Lucky in Love: Tips from the Wedding Gurus. This is a regional blog for residents of western Washington State (it’s part of banquetevent.com), but it has lots of information that’s not geographically specific. For example, the post from September 19 called “Great Read: Confessions of a Bad Wedding Guest” made me think that perhaps I need to be a little more conscientious about my etiquette when I’m invited to a wedding.

If you follow a particular wedding blog that you’d like to share with others, email ckughen at inkubook dot com to let me know about it.

You should also check out all our wedding-related book ideas. Right now, we’re offering free wedding photo books to new members. If you’re ready to get started on a book about your wedding, go ahead and join us!

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When we first launched Inkubook, we started with a pretty basic palette of backgrounds. We had white, of course, but if you wanted to gussy up your pages with a little bit of color or creativity, your choices were limited to a rainbow of pastels or a creation of your own design (done in Photoshop or some other graphics program).

One of our first goals in making improvements to the site was to add a greater variety of backgrounds. We’re proud to say that we now have more than 200 backgrounds to choose from, and we’re working on adding more all the time!

Today we’d like to draw your attention to our collection of wedding-themed backgrounds. This isn’t to say that you couldn’t use any one of our backgrounds in your wedding book. For example, if you’re having a beach wedding you might prefer to use the backgrounds with the sandy white seashells or the festive flip-flops instead of the backgrounds that we’ve deemed “wedding-like.” But if you need a starting place, we have these two background families ready for you.

First is the Classic Wedding collection. When we look at these backgrounds, we think of romantic, traditional weddings that proceed to the accompaniment of string quartets. Have a look.

The Classic Wedding background swatches. (Click the image to make it larger.)

Don’t you feel like you should be watching the bride and her father swirl around the dance floor while you enjoy a few pillow mints with your luscious piece of cake and glass of champagne?

If that’s a little too traditional and staid for your style, we also have a collection that we call Modern Wedding. It’s every bit as pretty as the Classic Wedding collection, but it has a different appeal.

The Modern Wedding background swatches. (Click the image to make it larger.)

Among the backgrounds in both collections you’ll see a page to use for signatures in a guest book. If you’d like some ideas for what you might do when creating your own guest book, check out Inspiration: Make a Customized Guest Book.

A page from a sample wedding book.

It’s a little bit hard to imagine the full effect of the backgrounds from these little swatches, so if you’d like to see them in action on some pages of a wedding book, have a look at this PDF.

We keep a running list of backgrounds we’d like to add in the future, and we’d be very interested to hear what types of wedding backgrounds you’d like to have available for your wedding book. You can use our Feedback form to shoot us an email with your ideas.

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