Documenting Kauai 2014 With Artifact Uprising Photobook

As a memory keeper I love having a variety of different tools at my fingertips to tell my stories.

Sometimes I want a project to be artsy & craftsy and other times I want it to be really focused on the simple beauty of words and photos. I feel thankful that there are options for all the different ways I want to tell my stories.

For my spring break adventure with Aaron to Kauai I decided to do a simple words and photos focused 6 inch x 8 inch photobook.

For printing I decided to try out Artifact Uprising. I've been watching them grow over the last few months and I adore their aesthetic and their mission: inspired by the disappearing beauty of the tangible / bettered by a community of inspired storytellers / driven by the belief that everyone has a story to tell. Tell On.

Ah, yeah.

DISCLAIMER | I connected with Artifact Uprising via Cathy (who has used their services and loved the result) and they offered to cover the cost of a photobook for me to try them out. I ended up going with a larger size book and I ordered two copies and I paid the difference. As always, all views here are my own.

INITIAL THOUGHTS

For this photobook I started out with a few things in mind:

• I wanted full page photos (vs. photos floating on a page of white or multiple cropped images on a page). And I wanted to add quotes to some of the photos.


• I wanted to use one set of word art used very simply on a white background. I ended up going with Diamonds Are Forever.


• I wanted this to be a curated collection of photos from our trip. I didn't intend to put every photo I took in this album.


• I wanted to do a 6 inch x 8 inch size. The soft-cover album from Artifact Uprising costs $22.99 for 40 pages.


• I wanted to just use the text I wrote up for my blog post.

PREPARE IMAGES/PAGES

To begin this project I first cropped and edited all my photos to 6 inch x 8 inches and saved as JPG files using Photoshop. All the photos I used for this book were taken with my iphone and I used RadLab to edit. On some of the photo pages I added quotes or word art (like the cover) before saving.

If you aren't adding word art or specialized text (fonts from your own collection) to your photos you can simply upload them to Artifact Uprising without cropping them first. I wanted full control over the fonts and text.

I also made 6 inch x 8 inch word art pages in Photoshop. I created a new 6 inch x 8 inch canvas (300dpi) with a white background and then placed the Diamonds Are Forever word art in the center of each page.

CREATE A MAP

After getting my images and pages ready I laid them out in Illustrator so I could see and decide on a flow for the book. You could do this same thing with a piece of paper and a pencil. I found it to be really helpful in deciding where I wanted two photo pages on a spread or one word art page and one full photo page.

I did end up going back in and adding a few more pages and photos after laying it out via this visual map.

UPLOAD PHOTOS/PAGES TO ARTIFACT UPRISING

After I had all my pages saved as JPG's I uploaded them to Artifact Uprising and placed them within the pages of the 6 inch x 8 inch book (there are currently three different soft-cover options for 6 inch x 8 inch photobooks). I selected the first one and removed the text box they have added because my image already had my word-art included.

I thought the user interface was smooth. It was easy to upload and drag and drop my images.

They offer a variety of different page layouts that you can choose from. I changed all the pages into the book to the full-image page so there was no additional cropping of my images.

One thing I did notice is that even when I saved my project as I was working on it, when I would come back to the project I would need to upload the images again (the ones I had already added to the book were saved in the book but they weren't available to me in the images area below the book). That could be something I wasn't saving/doing correctly, I'm not sure.

Other than that it was a super smooth experience. Really so easy and I love the final result.

Here's a look at my completed book:

Super happy and I would definitely use Artifact Uprising again for future photobooks and for printing.

PS | Also a reminder that the Designer Digitals Quarterly Sale is on right now with 40% off everything in the shop. Check out my complete collection of printables, word art, templates and more here.