Thanks to all the love, care, and creativity that goes into them, handcrafted holiday gifts are always extra special for both the giver and receiver. Photo gifts are especially thoughtful for the holidays, too, as they turn meaningful memories into treasured keepsakes. This holiday season, why not bring together the beauty of handcrafting and the heartfelt charm of a custom photo book?
With the versatile tools in Mixbook Studio™ and a diverse array of photo book themes to choose from, you can create remarkable photo book gifts infused with handmade flair. Apply your creative crafting skills to this digital project, which will be transformed into a tangible printed book you can wrap and give as a unique gift to someone you love.
Here are our top tips for adding DIY touches to any gift-worthy photo book project.
Choose a handicraft-inspired theme
While Mixbook’s DIY photo gifts are crafted online, endless customization options mean you can embrace a handicraft-inspired aesthetic for your creative holiday gifts. Among hundreds of photo book themes and across all categories, you can find designs that mimic the DIY elements of a traditional arts-and-crafts scrapbook.
Here are some of our favorite themes that offer the look of a handmade photo book:
- Digital Scrapbook: Inspired by an old-fashioned scrapbook, this theme features pressed flowers, postage stamps, washi tape strips, ribbons, and doodle stickers galore!
- Colorful Monthly Scrapbook: Each monthly spread pairs personal photos with colorful frames, bold-hued backgrounds, and whimsical illustrations that match the season.
- Vintage Travel: This travel book theme evokes deep nostalgia with its postcard and luggage tag motifs plus iconic air mail-stripe borders. For a similar photo book in a contemporary style, check out the Travel Photo Journal by Oh Joy!
- Family History: A scrappy vintage vibe suits the subject of this genealogy photo book, decorated with paper scraps, preserved flowers, and antique memorabilia.
- Love These Colorful Days by Laura Blythman: This fun theme offers the look of a whimsical paper craft project with its layered cut-paper backgrounds and accents.
- Colorful Everyday by Lines Across and Hand Painted Baby: Both of these themes feature hand-drawn patterns and text for that DIY look.
Capture memories with mementos
One of the best ways to embrace the memory-keeping creativity of a handmade photo book is to feature memorabilia along with photos and digital design assets. You can include any items imaginable, as long as you can photograph or digitize them with a flatbed scanner or scanning app.
Look for mementos that capture memories and add more dimension to the story you’re telling with each page or two-page spread in the photo book. Examples include:
- Travel memorabilia such as postcards, maps, ticket stubs, menus, coasters, souvenirs, and shells collected from the beach
- Personal mementos like hand-written notes, doodles, greetings cards, jewelry and accessories, medals, certificates, and little trinkets
- Arts and crafts created by yourself or loved ones, such as kids’ art projects, your own drawings or paintings, needlework, collages, or small sculptures
- Baby paraphernalia such as their tiny bracelet and hat from the hospital, precious outfits, little toys, handprints and footprints, and “welcome baby” cards
- Wedding or event memorabilia including flowers, lace from a veil or garter, cake toppers, a champagne cork, and wedding stationery samples
Read more about adding photo book memorabilia here: How to Enhance Your Year-in-Review Photo Book with Memorabilia
Decorate with stickers
Just as stickers are great for decorating handmade holiday gifts, Mixbook’s vast collection of digital stickers can be perfect accents for DIY photo gifts. Open the “Stickers” panel to the left of the Mixbook Studio™ space to see the recommended stickers for your photo book theme.
You can also browse or search for stickers, which are available in countless different styles. Options range from cute cartoon stickers to elegant illustrations and include alphanumeric stickers, abstract patterns, borders, shapes, boxes, and more.
Plus, you can edit all stickers by re-sizing and repositioning them, and even change the color palette.
Learn how to create your own stickers and backgrounds for your Mixbook (for free!)
Take layouts off the grid
Many of Mixbook’s professionally designed photo book themes are built around a grid layout, which gives them a tidy, polished look. Imagine an invisible grid overlaid across each page and spread, with the photos, text, and other design elements placed precisely along its vertical and horizontal lines. To give your next project the look of a handmade photo book, take your layouts off the grid!
Instead of keeping photos straight and everything aligned, move things around and pivot them at different angles. Move any design elements around the page by clicking and dragging. To adjust the angle of a photo, text box, or other design element, click the circular arrow icon above the bounding box, drag to the right or left, then release.
Lots of layers
Another easy way to give your photo book a handmade aesthetic is to embrace layering. Instead of placing photos, text, stickers etc. next to each other, play around with layering elements partially over each other. Imagine a pile of photo prints and memorabilia scattered over a table, and recreate that casual, haphazard arrangement on the page.
To create a layered layout, click on the photo, text, box, sticker, or other design element to open the pop-up editor menu. Click the “Forward” or “Back” button one or more times to move it above or below the adjacent elements. You might need to click multiple times, and use some trial and error, to get a layout you love. Be careful about overlapping so that you can still see the important parts of photos and read any text.
Try creative photo filters
Experiment with Mixbook Studio™’s built-in photo filters to achieve a unique, DIY look for your photo book. Click on a photo, then select “Edit” in the pop-up menu. Try the different filters—black and white, sepia, lighten, darken, 80s, and yellow—to find an effect you like.
Also experiment with opacity. Combining opacity and layering techniques can create some really interesting compositions.
Tip: For a broader range of options, apply filters to photos using your phone or photo editing software before uploading them to your Mixbook project (remember to save the original photo first).
Have fun with photo frames
Mixbook’s sticker collection includes all kinds of interesting photo frame designs. Search “frame” in the “Stickers” panel and find fun hand-drawn designs to amp up the DIY aesthetic for your photo book. Simply resize and layer the sticker under a photo.
Polaroid-inspired photo frames and photo booth-style strip designs also give the impression of a handmade photo book. Check out the Our First Anniversary theme to see both of these design ideas paired with doodles and a handwriting-inspired script font.
You can also customize photo frames using editing tools in the pop-up menu. Select “Radius” to give a photo rounded corners, or “Border” to customize the width and color of the photo perimeter. Use the “Shape” tool to transform your photo into a circle, triangle, star, heart, or arch shape. Add a drop-shadow with the “Shadow” tool to give dimension to the photo and make it look like it’s been attached to the page by hand.
Begin now & be ready for holiday gifting
There are so many photo book ideas that make excellent holiday gifts! Make a year-in-review for your family, a pet book for someone who loves their animal the most, or preserve grandma’s recipes in a custom cookbook for all your cousins.
With Mixbook’s intuitive interface, you can take inspiration from handmade photo books while benefiting from the speed and ease of digital design. This is fantastic for gift-giving, even if you’re super busy for the holiday season. Get a headstart and head over to Mixbook today!
