Organizing Digital Books - Yearbooks and Baby Books

Today I'd like to share some examples of how I have organized my books in the past. I wanted to highlight Yearbooks and Baby books. I think once you have a basic outline like this, it can be a little easier to fill in the blanks and perhaps a little less overwhelming to get started!

Yearbooks
I make a "yearbook" each year that is basically the family book. I use the same kit for the cover, inside cover, Year in Review page and the Conclusion page. For my 2012 book, here are all those pages:

For that year, my subtitle was "Along for the Ride" and I talk about why I chose that phrase in depth on my conclusion page. I really like this layout--I've used it for almost all my yearbooks.

Next, I have a title page for each month where I place all the pictures I want to use for that month but don't want to have a full layout about, and I have a short summary of the month. Here is a year's worth of my monthly pages--although, because of the great hard drive crash of 2012, I only have the last half of last year and the first half of this year!

 

Baby Books

For my baby books, I still followed a similar format. I chose one kit for entire book. For my oldest child, I created the kit mostly myself by scanning in her blankets, burp cloths, etc. I made a few basic ribbons and other things, and this made a fairly decent sized kit. I also created a really cool inside cover page where I took a picture of her each month so you could see, at a glance, how quickly she grew in one year!

 

 

Then, throughout her first year, I made sure to have a little photo shoot on or near her one month birthday. I had a fancy picture of her for each month! I would use this picture as a full-bleed photo and then create a one month cover page on the other side, with more pictures from the photo shoot. After they are a year old it's too hard to do this--they are too mobile!

I hope this is helpful to you as you start or continue your journey into digital scrapbooking! There is of course, no wrong way to do it. I find that my way is a little less...traditional...than the trendy way of scrapping, but it is also a lot more practical to busy moms who don't have the time or money to do millions of pages with few pictures and lots of blank space and elements. I love looking through my children's books and seeing how they've grown. If I was truly ambitious I would do a book for them each year or at least every few years but I just don't have the time for it. I will one day get the family book printed in several copies so that they each have one. In the meantime, this works for me! I hope it can be helpful for you!