Family Yearbook

I was a yearbook editor for many years in high school and university, so when someone gave me the idea of putting together a "family yearbook", I dove right in.

Now, I used to do it all from scratch in Adobe Pagemaker (dating myself a little bit), but there are so many websites that have easy software and cute templates now. So I hung up my yearbook hat and went with Shutterfly. I first used Shutterfly to put together a guest book for my wedding three years ago, and have done lots of event and vacation scrapbooks since. I'm a fan of Blurb as well - their software is closer to the desktop publishing software I used to use, with the ability to customize - but I find that Shutterfly is a little more intuitive (the tradeoff for customization opportunities).

I'm also very impressed by the fun new templates they've been coming out with, especially the ones with specific themes. They even gave me the option of adding a clear pouch to stick in the back, which can hold small pieces of memorabilia. Clearly, they've been paying attention to their target market!

There was no defined method to this. Some people like to stick to a specific number of allocated pages per month, but I tend to define things in terms of events. As I did in my yearbook days, I gave most events at least two pages, because I like to look at my book in spreads. I ended up with 32 pages, which consisted of:

• Title and end pages (1 each)
• Pregnancy photos (4 pages)
• Vacation (2 pages)
• Graduation (2 pages)
• Moving (2 pages)
• A friend's wedding (1 page)
• Our cat (1 page)
• Darian's baptism (1 page)
• Halloween (1 page)
• Christmas (2 pages)
• Other various baby photos, including his monthly "birthday" photos (about half the book - ha!)

Anyway, here is our 2011 yearbook. I call it "the crazy year" because it was the year everything changed for us.

It should arrive just in time for me to start working on 2012 :)

Click here to view this photo book larger

Turn your favorite photos into a photo book at Shutterfly.com.