Picture-A-Week...Why?

[pierces]

This is just a bit of history for those who post Picture-A-Week images regularly (and maybe a small poke at those who should 😉). This is my tenth year for the PAW Project and thanks to the consistency of Blurb, I have nine identically formatted books chronicling our lives on a weekly basis since 2012. After getting our first computer back in the early '90s, we started a Christmas tradition of publishing the Pierce Family Newsletter (or PFNL as it came to be known) instead of sending out the usual 25-in-a-box Christmas cards. These started out as WordPerfect documents printed on a dot-matrix printer chronicling the events in our family's year and wishing everybody good cheer and all that stuff. As our hardware advanced, photos were added and the complexity increased to include editions shaped like a snowman that opened up like a string of paper dolls, a medieval-style scroll, a calendar an finally, stitched or spiral-bound mini-paperbacks. Around 2009, I started pptphoto.com and that year we added a PFNL web edition with a story page and linked galleries. The next year we moved to Georgia for a job and began posting a lot more photos to share our lives with our now-distant family. As 2012 started, I decided that I would create a gallery with a weekly picture along with a short caption describing what event or thought inspired the photo to keep in touch with the family. Halfway through the year, things changed and we landed back in California. Though we were once again surrounded by family, I kept up the PAW project since it was actually rather fun. Since the PFNL was mainly a chronicle to share with family and the Picture-A-Week gallery contained a much more complete story of our year than any of the newsletters ever had, we decided to retire the PFNL after 20 years and sent out 25-in-a-box Christmas cards with a small personal note and a link to the 2012 PAW gallery. In January, 2013 I succumbed to the persistent ads from Blurb and made a book of all the 2012 images. I didn't like any of the templates available back then so I chose a two-page panorama format and laid out the page as an image in Photoshop, using Blurb's recommended dimensions and resolution . I really liked the way the book looked and still use the same format today. Below is last week's image formatted for the book. I do the pages weekly and typically order the yearbook as soon as the January Blurb 35% - 40% off coupon shows up. 2013-2020...rinse and repeat.

 

The do-you-make-albums post sort of prompted me to push the idea of making a yearbook since it has become a truly enjoyable project and may someday serve to remind future generations of our awesomeness. 🙂

 

 

 

The latest iteration of the Picture-A-Week gallery has worked out well and is really easy to maintain. I mirror the postings in Facebook for family that is "navigationally challenged".

 

 

 

Happy Publishing!

 

Dave

Edited April 13, 2021 by pierces

[ski ww]

Very interesting, thanks for sharing.

[tommui987]

LOOKS GOOD DAVE!

He shouted!