New Mixbook Themes – Sometheme to Talk About

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

Announcing Stickers and Custom Backgrounds

Today we have a very exciting announcment: you can now use stickers in your Mixbooks!  In fact, you can even upload your own stickers and backgrounds in several popular formats.  This is perfect for creating your own photo books, and it’s even better for digital scrapbooking.  Best of all, when your creation is complete, you can order a beautiful hardcover photo books starting at only $12.99!

Check out the short video we made showing off our new features:

Expect more (and better) videos to come…

Andrew
Chief Mixbooker

From Screen to Shining Screen

We’ve got two new features over here at Mixbook, and I can’t stop singing their praises! Keep reading to find out how much cooler your photobook will be because of them!

The first is fullscreen mode – now you can expand the photobook creator to take up your whole monitor screen by clicking on the fullscreen button at the top right-hand corner of the tool bar next to “Automix.” If you click the button once more, it will return to normal viewing. This feature will come in handy when you are putting pages together or resizing photos, because you’ll have more work area.

The second awesome feature is the ability to add a reflection to any photo or text that you want by clicking “Style” in the black editing tool bar. You can change the blur, offset (how much of the reflection is showing), and the opacity of the reflection. Ooooh, shiny!

Pages with beautiful landscapes and scenes will benefit from this feature – see the page we created below as an example of what you can do with the reflection tool.

We look forward to seeing what you do with these new tools, and we’d love to hear your experience with them! Have a wonderful weekend Mixbooking!

Alison

A new update is born!

Our newest improvement to date is here! Finally, a new photobook creator is born! This creator is faster, easier to use, and completely customizable. You spoke, and we heard you. You wanted to create your own layouts from scratch, and now you can. Here are a few other changes and updates that have been made:

- Faster and smoother uploading process
- Undo and Redo buttons (great for the klutzes like me who need to fix simple mistakes)
- Photos can be dragged straight from the photo drawer to a blank page
- Preview your book right in the photobook creator!
- Resize, rotate, and crop photo slots
- Add a color overlay to backgrounds
- Adjust the drop shadow on your photo
- Usage of the Cut and copy shortcut keys

This is just the beginning of the list of cool new features we’ll be adding in the next few months, if you have any feedback please feel free to email us at info@mixbook.com with any questions or comments.

Until then, enjoy the new photobook creator!

Our newest feature – AutoMix

We are so proud to present our newest feature … AutoMix! All of us at Mixbook World HQ have been waiting forever for this feature to be revealed, and we are so excited that Mixbookers finally get to use it. The AutoMix process allows users to create a photobook with the click of a button! This feature is super easy to use, and there are only three simple steps needed in order to make a book. It’s so simple, you could make a book with your hands tied behind your back!

1) Select a theme – choose from 9 fun options

2) Select photos – from your favorite sites like flickr, facebook, and Yahoo! photos (and more to come)

3) Click the “See Your Book” button – the book viewer will open so you can flip through your book

And that’s it! In seconds you have a photobook filled with all the photos you selected! If you aren’t completely happy with some of the backgrounds that were chosen, you can choose to edit it, add text, change the layouts, stylize frames, or add background colors. With all the pages laid out for you, there’s hardly any work to do. So go ahead, try it out! Then email us at feedback@mixbook.com to tell us what you think. At least you can’t say it took too long …

AutoMixin’ rocks my socks AND my shoes,
Alison

International Shipping Is Here!

Have you been wanting to send that Mixbook about your family to your grandmother in Finland? Well, now you can! International shipping has now become available.

We are now shipping to the following countries and international territories:

Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Guam, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, India, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Malta, Marshall Islands, Mexico, Micronesia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Northern Mariana Islands, Norway, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Puerto Rico, Romania, Russia, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States, Virgin Islands (U.K. and U.S.).

Don’t see your country of choice on the list? Email us at info@mixbook.com and we’ll try our best to make it happen.

Mixbook is going global,

Alison

Trick My Mix – Coming Soon!

Hey Mixbookers,

Be on the lookout for some new features on our site that will be coming your way. Soon we’ll have integration with other photo sites like flickr, facebook, and Yahoo! Photos. In the meantime, we’ll be postponing this week’s Trick My Mix post because of our busy bee status over here at Mixbook World Headquarters. Thanks for being faithful!

Generating Mixbook buzz ,
Alison

Trick My Mix – Custom Color Picker

Today’s tip is a simple and easy trick – with potentially beautiful results. Using our custom color picker to match your background and text to your photo(s) can give the appearance of continuity, and can be a striking addition to your book page. We took the photo below and clicked on our background color picker (the small colored square located in the background section) and scrolled over the sky color in our photo (instead of selecting from the pre-set colors). The background is now the same color of the sky, and is complementary to the photo.

The same can be done with the text by selecting the text and clicking on the text color box. Use the tiny eyedropper tool to scroll over the photo and click on a coordinating color. For our book page, we took the text color from the lights at the top of the hotel, as a contrast to the deep blue background color.

And voila! There you have it … a page as beautiful as the hotel itself.

Have a great weekend, and take some time to explore more of our new books and play around with our Creator tool!

Matchy Mixbooks are afoot,
Alison

New Feature – Open Books!

You know the old saying “read me like an open book”? Well, we’ve made that a reality by introducing our new Open Book feature!

What’s an “Open Book,” you ask? Well, it’s the essence of what making a Mixbook is! An Open Book allows anyone to contribute to its content by adding pages and photos. Unlike other books, everything is unlocked and editable by any user. An Open Book is marked by a symbol that looks similar to Lisa Simpson’s hairdo! Open Books can be found on the Explore Page in the “In Progress” section, and you can click “Edit” to automatically become a contributor of the book!

You can make an Open Book about anything – the food you like, the actors you admire, or even the recipes of other Mixbookers! I’ve given you blog readers a head start by making my very own Open Book. It’s called “A Recipe for Success” and I’d like it to contain all of your favorite recipes with photos! Maybe your grandma made some killer dumplings or your mom made the best brownies ever and you want to share it with the world. Or at least share it with me. Click the book below to contribute now!

You read me like an Open Mixbook,
Alison

Fresh Features on a Friday!

We’re back after a week of being MIA, so we thought we would spice it up and bring you more fun! This is the start of regular weekly posts to give you more Mixbook goodness! We know that’s what you want after all. So tune in each week to read our feature Mixbook articles, in addition to our other blog posts:

Monday – The Mixing Bowl, a selection of Mixbooks that tickle our fancy. Look out, yours might end up here!

Wednesday - Mix-ins, a few good ideas for books and what to do with them.

Friday – Trick My Mix, we’re doling out helpful expert tips and tricks to make your Mixbook the best it can be. Think of this as the extras section on a DVD – an added bonus! And since today is FRIDAY, it’s time to get started.

Trick My Mix – the Mixbook Creator

Trick #1 – many people don’t realize that when you’re using the Creator that you can enlarge the tool drawer area to view more of your photos, layouts, frame selection, and backgrounds. Just click on the sidebar and drag it out to the desired size you’d like (up to 5 rows wide) and VOILA! There you have it … a larger viewing area to improve your Mixbook creativity!

Just a regular ol’ drawer … happy and carefree. But click and drag, and you have …

 

A drawer that is now large and in charge.

Trick #2 – This is not so much a trick as it is a tip. Save yourself some time and add photos that you’ve already uploaded for another book. Do you need more pictures of grandma for your book? Click on “Add Photos” and select “From Mixbook” to add photos from your other books. You’ve just shaved minutes off the upload process so you can get to creating your book!

If you have any tips you want to share with other Mixbookers, email us at info@mixbook.com. Be sure to subscribe to our RSS feed if you like what you see!

Just keep Mixbookin’,
Alison