So instead of ordering an awesome professional album of B's first year, I settled for a pretty good version from Blurb instead. (I had actually planned on ordering through My Publisher but they didn't offer the square size I need and my templates were already designed so I went with Blurb for the square pages.) I was pleasantly surprised with the quality of the photo book. Held next to a Shutterfly book (which I've gotten lots of free ones of and FREE is always good!), the weight and quality difference is definitely noticeable. The paper is thicker and the pictures are clearer. The photos are sharp and the color quality is great. I was impressed!
But I'm getting ahead of myself......
To get organized for the album I went through my folders by month and pulled my favorites. (I store my photos on the computer by year, date, name i.e.: 13MAR Hicks. Sometimes I put subfolders in the monthly folder i.e.: 13MAR31 Easter.) The easiest way to gather the info for the text was pulling it off the blog. Unfortunately, I hadn't been blogging the entire year so there were a lot of blanks to fill in. Fortunately, I had a lot of it written in his actual baby book and well baby check papers. If you're trying to condense the information in your book, try to choose just the pictures and/or info that tell your story. If the picture doesn't strike emotion or memories in you, you can leave it out.
To design the book (I used Photoshop), I used the same basic template throughout and added a little text to help jog my memory down the road. I tried to keep it to 20 pages but I was nowhere close to that. (I did cover from birth to December 2012 though so it was a bit longer than a normal year and also that first year has all kinds of things that most years wont have so I was okay with it. In the future I plan to order them for the year so this year will cover Jan-Dec.) I tried to stay away from putting too many pictures on a single page but there was just no way around it for some pages. If you don't want to design your own template, you can just gather a folder of images and drop them into the album designs online. Super easy!
In his book I wanted to cover major milestones, big events, favorite things and every day moments. I think we did a pretty good job of hitting all the major bases (and this isn't even all of the pages!).
Here's a sneak peek:
