Picture this. Your BFF’s b-day is coming up in a few weeks (thanks for the heads-up, Facebook!) and you want to create a photo book on Mixbook full of heartwarming photos of the two of you together to give to her as a birthday gift. Great idea (we think she’ll adore and treasure it forever)! But wait. The memory card inside your digital camera doesn’t house any images from the wedding in which you were both bridesmaids last year.

Don’t despair! This is where Facebook comes in. No doubt there are entire albums full of photos featuring the affair, uploaded to Facebook by wedding guests, groomsmen, the shutter-happy Mother of the Bride, etc. Jackpot! All the pictures you need to create a beautiful Mixbook are available at the tips of your fingers (try our AutoMix magic wand tool to instantly populate your entire Mixbook with photos). How? View our fun tutorial video or read the below instructions to discover how to populate your Mixbook with your (and friends’) Facebook photos!

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What’s the new feature that we’re so proud of? It sure is “sometheme to talk about!” (please forgive the cheesy puns)

Mixbook now has themes available to help you create a book just like *that*! All you have to do is click on a theme of your choice, and we’ll load in all the backgrounds, layout pages, and stickers for that theme. Just upload and add your photos! You can manually put them into the book, or we can AutoMix them in the book for you! Could it be any cooler?

And with our Mixbook Editor, your theme photo book is still completely customizable — you can move things around, add new text, rotate objects and layer away! It’s all up to you. Here are just a few of the themes that we have available (there are still more to come!):

Winter Holiday by Vivian C.

Baby Girl by Lisa N.

Classy Wedding by Emily C.

And two wonderful themes just in time for Valentine’s Day!

My Valentine by Brian T.

Ten Reasons Why I Love You by Alison T.

We’ve made Mixbooking easy and fun, and we hope this inspires you to be creative and make a book of your own! Get Started Now!

The Mixbook Team

Since we’ve been putting these posts off for way too long, we thought it would be a good idea to combine them into one super duper huge post! So here it is, the “Trick Mixin’” update … a compilation of a trick, some lick-the-spoon Mixing Bowl books, and a handy dandy mix-in treat.

Sound too good to be true? Keep reading!

Trick My Mix – Scrapbook Type

This trick is similar to the last one, as it focuses on how to decorate the pages of your book with type/words. The following are three examples of how to integrate words by making text boxes look like the cute letter cut-outs you’d see in scrapbooks.

- The biggest part of this technique is picking a layout that has square text boxes. My personal favorite is the 4 photo layout with two text boxes (as seen in the pink layout), but you can experiment with any layout.

- Next think of any word or words that you’d like to represent in the boxes. Here we have “C-U-T-E” and a series of words (silly, goofy, funny, us being us) for the boxes. For the word “cute” we set the font to Chaparral Pro Bold and the size to 59 or 60, and centered it in the box. You may have to play around with this to get it right.

- Create a Custom Frame by selecting the border color from a color on the page, and setting the border thickness to “8,” which is the thickest setting. Then to create a colored text box go to the “more” button in the Frames section, and click on any background color of your preference. Set the transparency to 1.00 so that the background of the text box will be completely solid. Click “Save” and your custom frame will be saved for future use. Drag the custom frame onto your text boxes, and voila! There you have it! Letter cut-outs to personalize your Mixbook – who would have thought?

- Play with your words - highlight only portions of text to enlarge,bold or italicize them. See below for our final example of this Scrapbook type method, then have at it!

The Mixing Bowl 5

This week’s Mixing Bowl is full of greens! Only one serving though, since we have jam packed this post full of other things.

Community Garden 2007 by Mark S., Lisa L. and Michelle B.

This book caught my eye because of the delicious fresh veggies that are on the front cover. This Mixbook is all about a group of folks that got together every week to spend an evening at a community garden. Months later, they enjoyed the literal fruits (and veggies) of their labor. This colorful and picturesque book makes gardening look like so much fun – I’m ready to pick up my gloves and go! I love how the Mixbookers used our textured backgrounds to add to the theme of the book – the first page has our grass background.

Mix-ins 4

This week’s Mix-ins come from our love of best friends and all the love they bring into our lives. Use a Mixbook to pay tribute to your best friend, the love of your life, or even 10 of your closest homies. Make a Mixbook about the memories and good times you have had together – just because. I’m willing to bet that your best bud will love it. Check out this sample from Mixbooker Libby S., and her best gal pal.

Well, that’s all she wrote for today. Enjoy!
Alison

Today’s trick comes from a night of staying up late and experimenting with fun new ways to present the typed content of a book. Try these examples below in your own Mixbook!

1) ABC Type – this is what we call ABC type, because instead of typing regular content, you use letters to create a type of design on the page. This is how we got the look below:

- Choose a background and set it to 30% transparency (find this feature by clicking “more” in the background section of the Creator)

- Set the font to Cooper Black and the size to 45. Type the letters of the alphabet, or even use words related to the photo (see word example below).

- Change the colors of the fonts by highlighting selected text and clicking on the color palette to select a color. Then use your own eye to change the colors as you prefer.

2) Word Type – instead of using letters, use words to create a design.

How cool is that? We especially love this technique when it is used in a themed book. Change the words and the style depending on what your theme is (the book above was about a trip to Seaworld) – maybe use some of the following:

A book about France – Eiffel, Je t’aime, Oui, Ooh la la, Macarons, Croissant, Romantic, Love.

A book about your kids – Funny, Messy, Loud, Fun, Family, Sweet, Spunky, Caring, Loving, Imaginative, Creative, Youthful.

A book about your dog – Silly, Goofy, Playful, Curious, Cute, Lazy, Nosy, Cuddly, Fluffy, Puppy.

This is just one new way to make your Mixbook unique and interesting!

Dedicated to making Mixbooks better,
Alison