Tama's Mustache Bash

Tama's third birthday was a huge mustache bash!  It was a lot of hard work but it was all worth it to see how excited Tama was for his birthday!

Here's a close up of all the homemade treats.

The gift table.

The kids all came dressed in their mustache shirts. And I painted mustaches on all the guests when they arrived at their party. Here's one of Tama's friends being so good and still while I painted his on.

I tried to get a picture of all the kids before they got all crazy. 

I didn't plan any games for the kids, instead they just ran around like maniacs happy kids. We had pizza for lunch and after eating, we had cupcakes for all the kids!  This year, we decided to give all the kids their own candle to blow out.  

Tama chowing down on his cupcake.

We then opened Tama's smorgasbord of gifts.  Seriously, this kid got so many presents!  I kept telling Tama to never expect to get that many presents from us! :)  But really, it was super sweet and he LOVED, and I mean, LOVED, his presents.  This day will probably be better for him than Christmas!  Ha ha.

Bill and some of the boys with their munchstaches. What a fun birthday!  What are we going to do next year???

Invitations for Tama's 3rd Birthday

Although I had posted Tama's birthday invitations a little while ago. I wanted to post the final package that each kid got.

I made shirts for each of the kids to wear to the party. They're going to be all so cute in their matching shirts!

Weddings: C & G

A couple samples of the wedding invitations made for a lovely couple.  I loved their simple and elegant style. I'm sure their wedding will be gorgeous!

Logo: Squeak Boutique

 Some samples of a fun logo for Squeak Boutique. They are planning on selling children's shoes.

Note: I am no longer providing logo services.

Logo: Lydian

Note: I am no longer providing logo design.

Mustache Bash

I'm really behind on posting. Here's Tama's birthday party invitations.  He is surprisingly super excited about having a mustache bash.  This kid is the coolest.

Logo Work

Due to the tremendous amount of time logo work requires and my other time commitments, I have decided to no longer offer logo work as part of my services.  I've been grateful to be a part of so many of your logos and wish you all the best.  Thank you!

Valentines

For Valentine's day this year, I thought it'd be fun to make a few custom ones for Tama to hand out to his buddies.  I love how fun they were to give.  :)

Addie's Elmo Party!

 

What a fun birthday party!  I know my son would have loved going to an Elmo party too!  I'm sure Addie loved her party as much as I loved making Addie's birthday party invitations!  So much fun!

Viovio Part II: The End Result

See part I for a description of the design process. 

Exactly two weeks after I ordered my photobook, I got my book in the mail!  I was so excited to open it up!  The book was well packaged and when I pulled it out... I was immediately disappointed.  Not with the quality of the book, because it was apparent that it was really good quality... but because of the cropping of every single one of my pages. The cover included.  The cover was designed to look like this:

Since I wasn't aware of the cropping guides until I got it in the mail and logged onto viovio as mentioned in part I, my entire book was sadly disappointing. Given all the tremendous time I spent on designing every single page, I was really really excited for this book and the end result fell short.  On other websites, this is not a problem because it's layouts are preset and designed so that it is not cropped improperly.  My other experience with websites that allow custom inserts such as viovio also did a much better job by clearly showing the crop guides in the design editor while designing each page, as opposed to a separate feature inadequately labeled which I would have to know to turn on.  I also noticed that the crop guides it did show online did not match what actually got cropped.  It cropped far less than what was pictured but still managed to make my pages look cramped and unprofessional.

But, what's done is done.  Next time I use viovio, I will never make the same mistake.  I wanted to spend some time on the quality of the actual book.  The premium photo printing really showed.  My pages are thick and the colors turned out fantastic.  I am very pleased with the quality of the pages and the vibrance of the colors.  The binding also looks really strong and I think it will last a very long time.

In summary:

The ideal consumer for viovio's services is one who has the graphic design skills to create their own pages. This would be wonderful for a digital scrapbooker!  They even have a 12x12 size photo book! Since you'd already have all your pages designed, you could just upload them all and print out the book!  (Just make sure you watch out for the cropping!) This is not an ideal service for someone who just wants to drag and drop their pictures into an album.

Pros
- Great quality photobook
- Excellent binding
- Great pricing structure
- REALLY affordable shipping
- Huge range of printing options

Cons
- Clunky design editor
- Very difficult to use for drag and drop photobooks
- Additional costs for using different layouts
- Cluttered website makes it difficult to get the information you need

Now that I have gotten some experience with viovio, I feel like I understand how I can maximize its services!  Although it was a painful learning experience, I know that next time the process will go much swifter and the end result will be much more satisfying. Hopefully, viovio will also make some design changes to their website and design editor to make the experience smoother but the quality of the book plus the affordable pricing will have me brave the clunkiness to make another book for sure!