• The Basics of How to Make a Flipbook
• Photo Book Considerations
• Planning Your Pictures
• Mastering Your Patience
• Making Your Plans a Reality

They’re not as common as traditional photo books, but you’ve probably enjoyed the experience of a few.

Flipbooks magically create the illusion of animation without the need for a projector or other equipment. You view individual pictures for only a moment as you quickly thumb past pages. Most flipbooks are fairly basic and consist of simple drawings. However, they’re not limited to this format. You can make a flipbook using photographs with a bit of careful planning.

If making a photo flipbook sounds like an interesting idea, there are a number of ways you can go about it. Before diving right in it’s important you understand how to make a flipbook and how they exactly work.

The Basics of How to Make a Flipbook

Flipbooks work by taking a number of similar pictures and arranging them so they can be “flipped” through quickly. You do this by fanning across the end of the book with the thumb. 

The pictures have only subtle differences, progressing through a scene. When the pages are flipped, the eyes notice the changes and are interpreted as movement. It’s similar to how the frames of film change a little and appear as motion when the movie is played.

When making a custom flipbook, your focal point of the image needs to be located closer to the outer edge of the page. When the pages are flipped, that’s the image area that will be most visible. Assure there are enough pictures to allow for subtle enough changes to create the motion effect. 

Photo Book Considerations

When using photos to create your custom photo flipbook, there are a few things to consider.

Always opt for a softcover photo book instead of a hardcover. The cover itself needs to be flexible to allow for the flipbook function. You’ll need many pictures to create the desired effect. You can’t just make Apple photo books with the pictures from your iPhone and call it a day. Be sure you have enough pictures with subtle enough differences to achieve the animated effect when the pages are flipped.

Planning Your Pictures

It is important to plan out your pictures in advance. 

This can be tricky with photos. Your pictures should remain basically the same except for the subtle differences between one pic and the next. A heavy wind or people walking past could compromise the shots you’ve carefully crafted. Fortunately, with a little planning and a healthy dose of burst photography, you should be able to work past this. Plan your entire scene from start to finish. You’ll notice the difference when you see your results.

Mastering Your Patience

Taking pictures is the first part of making a photography flipbook. Then, sort through those photos and arrange them in order. You can choose either direction to have your book flip to tell the story. Take some time to make any edits or add any desired effects for the final flipbook. The process may take some work, but the results will be astounding. Feel free to print or map out drafts of your flipbook first to see how well parts of the animation work. Your patience will pay off in the end. Your flipbook will be truly unique and keepsake-worthy. 

Making Your Plans a Reality

The post How to Make a Flipbook out of Your Next Photo Book Project appeared first on The Motif Blog.

When it comes to planning an event, there are a lot of little details that come together to make it as special and memorable as possible. 

Bringing all of the moving parts together into one cohesive event isn’t always easy, but when you do pull it off, your event can be something truly magical. Something you might not have thought about that can help make your event stand out from others is a themed guest book. Letting all of your guests sign in and leave their personal mark on such a book creates a cherished keepsake that you’ll love for years to come.

On the other hand, having a more generic guest book at your event can seem a bit out of place. You have all of these other personalized elements that you’ve synchronized with each other, but then there’s a cookie-cutter guest book that people sign and forget. If you want to make an impact, try matching the guest book to your event theme so that it becomes a part of the event itself. There’s no better way to do this than with a photo guest book that captures the theme in a way most of your guests haven’t seen before.

Why a Photo Guest Book?

Right now, you might be wondering exactly why you might create a custom guest book as a photo book instead of a standard guest book. 

There’s actually a good reason for this: You can better capture the theme of your event through pictures than you can through the limited design elements of a standard guest book. Think about photo yearbooks and other personal photo books that mark a specific place or time; they tend to bring memories to life and stay with you beyond the event or time period itself. On the flip side, a more standard no-photo guest book is not something widely considered to be as personal or customized of a memento. The point of having a photo guest book isn’t just to record who is at your event, but to create a personal keepsake that will help represent your event well in the future.

What Is Your Event’s Theme?

Before you get too far into starting to design a guest book for your event, you’ll want to stop and think about what the theme of your event actually is. 

For some events, this thought process is easy because you actually do have a formal theme already created. For other events, it’s a bit trickier; the theme is inherently tied to the type of event (such as a wedding), but as far as thematic planning goes it may have stopped with picking the colors that people will wear. There isn’t anything wrong with that… many events don’t have any sort of a formal theme.

If you don’t have a formal theme for your event, this can make the act of designing your photo guest book a little more intensive–and interesting, too. You can put a bit more thought into which photos to add and what aspects of your event to bring to the forefront. Fortunately, you can break down different aspects of your guest book theme to make the creation and customization easier.

Three Aspects of Your Photo Book

When it comes to designing a photo book to serve as a guest book for your event, there are three aspects that you should focus on: The pictures it contains, the colors you use in the book and, the text you include. Each of these aspects is a key part to the book’s theme, and that’s what you want to match up with the theme of your event. 

Take a moment to consider each of these aspects in a little more depth to see just how they can work together to create a guest book for your event:

• Pictures: Obviously, your pictures will be an important part of any photo book. For this book, though, you need to make sure that you’re selecting photos that not only capture the reader’s attention but are also relevant to the event for which the book was created. The photos should not only match the theme in general content, but they should also match it in tone.
  
  Select pictures that bring up the right types of nostalgia, evoke appropriate emotions, and maybe even make guests laugh with unexpected flashes of comedy. Put care into your picture selections since they will become a part of the event’s theme just as much as any decorations or centerpieces.
  
  
• Color: The colors that you use in your guest book should sync up with the predominant colors of your event, but there’s more to the effective use of color than just making sure that a few colors match. The colors you use will not only tie the book into the event’s theme colors, they will also serve as accents to the pictures you select.
  
  This means you have to make sure that they aren’t going to clash, or if they do then it’s at a point that’s appropriate (to draw attention to a specific picture, for instance.)
  
  
• Text: The text that you include in your book is just as important as your photo and color choices, even though this is the aspect that’s most likely to be neglected. It’s easy to forget when designing a book like this that it isn’t just meant to be a photo book… you want it to effectively serve as a guest book as well.
  
  Your choice of text can help in this regard, while also providing a narrative that ties the various pictures and pages together. You can use text to keep guests moving through the book, connecting them back to the event and encouraging them to sign where appropriate. Your text is what truly transforms the book from a photo book into a guest book worth signing.

All of this might sound like a lot of work for a guest book, but the end result will be very worth it. What is just a guest book today may end up being a treasured keepsake or even a coffee table book at some point in the future.

Tying the Book to Your Theme

After coming up with the perfect photos and figuring out how to design a guest book with them, you still have to tie your book into the overall theme of your event. Don’t worry, though… you’ve already done most of the work in that regard, even if you don’t realize it yet.

The selections you made regarding pictures, colors and text were all part of tying your book and your event theme together. Aspects of your event and its theme are already designed into the book, so the book itself should fit well as part of the event. Now you just need to do a little bit more to make sure that the book fits into the event instead of just sitting awkwardly by the sidelines.

Make a place for your guest book where it can have its own focus, ideally near the entrance so that it will be one of the early things that guests see. Don’t just stick it on the end of a crowded table; find a stand or podium where the guest book can be the center of attention, and, if necessary, include a sign or mention it to your guests so they’ll know that you would like them to sign. You want it to seem natural there so that your guests can be more easily drawn in once they open its cover.

Designing Your Photo Book

Now that you know how to match your guest book to your theme and make it a natural part of your event, the big challenge that remains is actually creating it. 

Start looking for pictures to include early, since you may need to go through a few different revisions to make sure that you have everything just right before your event. Come up with a set of photos that you’d like to include, plus alternate shots for different pages so that you can swap out the various pictures if you find that certain pics just don’t work well with others.

Keep in mind that this is supposed to be a guest book too, so you’re going to need to leave places for your guests to sign. This could be blank pages at the back of the book, areas set aside on the various pages, or even the inside front and back cover. Part of the decision on where these spaces will go will depend on how you lay your book out, and it’s definitely something that you should keep in mind during the design process. Wherever you decide to leave space for signatures, don’t forget to include a bit of text so that your guests will know where they’re supposed to sign.

An Event to Remember

If this seems like a lot of preparation for a guest book, it won’t seem that way after your event has come and gone.

By that point, you’ll have a book full of signatures and notes from family and friends, giving you something to look back through fondly to help you remember the event and everyone who attended. You may find that some of your guests made notes around the pictures, sharing a joke or calling up old memories. As more people sign the book during the event, it will take on something of a life of its own that will be fun to explore later. The book that you make to serve as a guest book might end up becoming a major keepsake that you turn to time and again.

There’s also a chance that others will want a copy of the book as well, both as a way to remember the event and to be able to look back on the various memories you evoked with your pictures. You might even find yourself having to order multiple copies because your seemingly simple guest book ended up being the life of the party. When was the last time you saw a guest book that was so in-demand people wanted their own personal copy?

The post How to Create a Photo Guest Book that Matches Your Event Theme appeared first on The Motif Blog.

Life is full of incredible moments, and we love capturing the essence of them. The first birthdays with our children. Weddings with our childhood best friends. Anniversary parties for parents. The special bond with a favorite pet. That once-in-a-lifetime family trip. But perhaps just as fun as the moment we snap that special memory is getting to relive it later. Sure, you could simply print it out and frame it, but there are so many fun, different ways to honor those special times! Here are five unique photo project ideas you’ll want to try!

1. Create a custom photo book

It’s a rare occasion when we take a single photo of an event. More often, we take a series of photos throughout the event—think of a birthday, a trip away, or a night out on the town with friends. Motif custom photo books turn your photo collections into commemorative albums you can flip through and enjoy for many years to come.

Create a custom photo book that details the beautiful animals and nature during your trip to Fiji. Or that honors the local traditions you learned while on that trip in Brazil. Document every precious first of your new baby’s first year: The quality papers and inks bring every dimple and eye sparkle to life so you can relive them over and over.

Motif can create your book for you, even helping you evaluate and choose images and placing them in professionally designed layouts. Or, if you’d like complete creative freedom, you’ll find templates, fonts, color options, and editing tools that allow you to customize every detail and photo so you can create the photo book of your dreams.

2. Create a custom birthday card

A birthday card is a classic way to wish someone a happy birthday. Greeting card companies have given us words to thoughtfully spread our cheer and love for the birthday boy or girl easily. Make the next birthday card one to remember by customizing it for the birthday honoree!

Motif photo cards come with options for multiple sizes and folded or flat cards so you can create the exact format you’re imagining. Customize your greeting, and design your card to include a single photo or a collection of images that honors the birthday person. You can resize the photo and edit your layout, or simply choose from a variety of professionally designed themes to create your perfect, custom card in just moments. And the best part? (Well, one of them, anyway.) Custom, created-just-for-them cards start at just $1.49!!!

3. Make a custom calendar to kick off the New Year

We all have access to calendars on our phones, but if you’re like us, there’s just something therapeutic about being able to actually cross things off and circle important dates—to see what’s coming next in front of us. What better way to make that an even better experience than seeing those you love while organizing and managing life? Motif custom calendars do just that—and take it one step further.

Not only can you customize each calendar page with a unique photo (or several of them), but you can customize days. Update the text on individual calendar dates with your personal important dates. You’ll never miss a birthday, anniversary or family trip. You can even commemorate special family events, like the day you got engaged or the moment your son took his first steps. You can include a countdown to Christmas or to your upcoming trip to Disney. There are countless ways to make your calendar special. They make great gifts, too!

4. Make a children’s story book

Have some creative flair? Put it to use creating custom children’s story books. You don’t have to go through a publishing house—you can simply create your own! Whether you’re a parent, teacher, cool aunt, or grandparent, custom books make amazing gifts to share with children.

Create your own storyline, and write your own characters in. If you’re writing the book for a specific someone, make them the main character! Teachers can write a book that helps teach their classroom rules in an entertaining way. Make it funny, make it sentimental—it’s your story, so you can make it whatever and exactly what you want!

In Motif, you’ll find intuitive text tools so you’re able to format your story in your choice of font, color of text that best fits each page, and even move copy as your book takes form. Add in photos to illustrate your story, or even use your own sketches or class artwork to illustrate the book in a unique and memorable way. Design your own cover and even add the book title to the spine so it’s easy to find!

5. Create custom holiday photo cards

When we hear “holiday cards,” our minds jump to Christmas, Hanukkah, and end-of-year celebrations. But think of all the other holidays we usually send cards to commemorate! Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, birthdays, Grandparents’ Day, and anniversaries, to name just a few. Sure, you could go out and buy a card, but isn’t making one so much more special?

For Grandparent’s Day, consider having your little one draw a picture for their grandparent: You can then use Motif to turn that picture into a custom card showing your love and appreciation for all the grandparent does to love on your child.

For Mother’s and Father’s Day, dig through your childhood photos until you find your favorite with your parent. Scan it in, and use Motif to give it new life. Add your custom greeting, and give your mom or dad a new memory by reliving their own memory through your eyes.

The options are endless but all have one thing in common: The recipient is sure to love your custom card and the time you took to make something so special for their day.

There are countless photo projects you can create using Motif: It’s limitless with your creativity. If you’ve already used Motif to create your own photo project, we’d love to see what you made! Tag us and your project using #mymotif to share and inspire other users. Need some help getting started? Find inspiration by searching #mymotif on Instagram.

The post Five Unique Photo Projects You’ll Want to Try appeared first on The Motif Blog.