A few weeks ago Luke, who works at Queensberry, told us his grandparents were away overseas. After selling their movie theatre they’d decided to take a trip to Italy. They kept in touch, as he asked them, but little did they know he was collecting their photos to make an album of their adventures and special time together.  It was a fun project to work on. He kept feeding the images to Steph as they came in, and in some ways, we almost felt like we were travelling with them… We loved seeing their smiling faces, and loved even more the stories that Luke would tell us as he dropped To View More >>

Looking through the design workshop yesterday I discovered a book I made nearly twenty years ago. It reminded me how grateful I am to one of my mentors, the bookbinder Michael O’Brien, a man of enormous talent, insight and good humour, and without a doubt the most eccentric person I’ve ever met. I met Michael in 1994, just before he moved his workshop from Auckland to the South Island. One of the books he was working on was for a European art collector, to mount his Picasso drawings. This was a revelatory experience for me. Do people like this exist? Do they pay thousands of dollars for books? To View More >>

LOST MEMORIES (French, English Subtitles) from Francois Ferracci on Vimeo. We saw this clip recently and it really resonated with us. Not only do we work in an industry that values the physical, but it's an important reminder of how easily our memories can be lost if we're not careful with them. I shared the video with Heather, which opened up an interesting discussion. "The printed image and the written word are the only way to directly access the past," she says. "We have family images captured on slides, but now it's hard to find a projector for them. Same for 8mm movie projectors. Tape VCRs To View More >>

Every now and then I see an "About" page that I particularly like, such as Amanda's at Orchard Cove Photography. It features this photograph, which she says "captures me and my brother running up the hill at my Grandma’s house when I was two years old. When my Grandma passed away, I found the photo framed in her bathroom. It now hangs in my bedroom." Amanda says that one image calls back countless memories of her grandmother, "playing with her dogs, exploring her movie collection, leafing through her scrapbooks, eating her famous tuna salad, feeding the birds, jumping on her bed, and trying To View More >>

Ideally I like to see the Problem Reporter empty every time I finish a design, but it isn't always, and you're probably the same. By default, any errors you can't ignore are listed first in the Reporter - the ones with the little red and white "X" against them. We can't make your album until they're corrected, so PJ won't let you send your order until they are. The items with the little yellow warning triangle you can ignore if you like. They're sorted into spacing issues, then sizing issues, and lastly alignment issues. Obviously, you want to take care of your red issues first. Complete your To View More >>