My first venture into digital scrapbooking

I've been interested in scrapbooking for a while now, but never really got into it. There's so much paper and so many punches and just so much STUFF. Plus, all my pictures are digital, and I wasn't interested in paying a fortune to get them all printed so that I could start the scrapbooking process. (I do help with the math team scrapbook every year, and I pretty much get my fill of the physical scrapbooking from that.)

So when I started hearing about digital scrapbooking, I was interested in pursuing that. But problems arose there too--I don't have Photoshop, wasn't interested in buying it, and don't know how to use it (I've forgotten everything I learned freshman year of college on the newspaper staff). And most of the really creative stuff requires you to have at least Photoshop Elements.

Then I found a Groupon for Mixbook and I thought that might be the answer. I've used services like this before--I made our wedding album through Blurb (take a look here), and I enjoyed it. But the nice thing about Mixbook is that you can take all those backgrounds and stickers and things of that nature and upload them and use them in your design, or you can use the prepared layouts.

So that's what I did! My ultimate goal is to make a big photo album from the four months in which Bryan and I were in Hong Kong in college (I would estimate conservatively that I took at least 1000 pictures during that time), but I wanted to try something small first. I have many, many pictures that I've taken in the past two and a half years that we've been dog owners, so I made a photobook of my dogs.

 

http://www.mixbook.com/flash/mixbook_albums.swf?b=5495591&k=KM75dKMYh7&mode=production&pid=5495591&autoplay=true

| View Sample Photo Books | Create your own Photo Book

Most of the pages are from pre-made templates. However, I made the Halloween and Christmas pages on my own, using free digital scrapbooking collections that I downloaded. I think it turned out really well, and I'm excited to start working on more of these in the future. The only major issue I had with Mixbook is a small one--for some reason exclamation marks would not show up in anything I typed! I use a LOT of exclamation marks so this is a problem. I'm going to have to send an e-mail and inquire what's going on. Since they weren't working in the editor, I didn't put any in the book--maybe it was just a problem with my browser.

Tell me what you think! I'm very new at this so I appreciate feedback.