Mixbook

I had never heard of Mixbook before, a free-to-use website for making custom photo books, wall calendars, and greeting cards, but after trying it out, I'm pleasantly surprised with its service. Mixbook simply gets right everything an amateur or a graphically-inclined person needs to churn out a beautiful finished product, although the items you can purchase are limited to books, calendars, and cards. The variety of templates is good, and the ability to further tweak those templates is even better, and that's Mixbook's sweet spot. Additionally, the option to work on a blank canvas, with oodles of additional ways to add color, text, objects, and images to your project, rounds out the available choices.

The finished product is more polished than anything I've ever gotten back from Snapfish, but not quite as high quality as products I've received from Shutterfly, our Editors' Choice. The experience of using Mixbook rivals that of both CafePress and Zazzle, even though the latter two have many, many more types of products you can design and buy either singly or in bulk. And indeed, for bulk items, you may prefer CafePress or Zazzle, seeing as discounts are plentiful the more you order. Mixbook beats them for personal projects, though.

Sizes, Styles, and Price
To test Mixbook, I designed a custom photo wall calendar.

Mixbook offers two sizes for most calendars: an 11 by 8.5-inch ($19.99) and a 14 by 11-inch ($34.99). There's also a square 12 by 12-inch ($29.99) option if you opt to skip the template and add photos and perhaps background designs, which are provided, to an otherwise blank page. Definitely go with Mixbook if you're looking for a larger or wider calendar. With CafePress, the only option is 11 by 8.5 inches, although it's available as either a 12-month ($19.99 plus shipping) or 18-month ($24.99 plus shipping) calendars.

Mixbook's prices fall well within the ballpark of other services. Shutterfly hits the high end, but only barely, with its custom calendars starting at $21.99 (comparable to Mixbook's smaller calendar), while Zazzle is on the low side, with prices starting at $17.95. Because CafePress and Zazzle both target the small business market, you can nab a better deal when you buy in bulk with those services. If you just need one or two, though, stick with Mixbook, even though the shipping charge, $8.99, is a bit high. Its other benefits make it worthwhile.

Online Design Tools
When you start a project, Mixbook opens in a full screen window, hiding all extraneous browser buttons to give you the largest workspace available. This designing area is the most spacious and cleanly laid out one I've seen from websites of this kind.

Brief descriptions of buttons appear when hover over them, but most are intuitive to use based on their icons. Mixbook's editing capabilities extend beyond the basics to include color correction sliders, center guidelines that pop up when you drag and object to change its position, and a host of other simple yet essential tools.

Of the custom card and calendar services I've used, Mixbook probably has the most stylish templates, even if the total number from which to choose is only in the dozens. But the site goes one step further: The online editing tools let you tweak the templates, giving you truly endless possibilities. If you don't want an element on the page, you can remove it. If the placeholder is too big or small, you can resize it. Templates here work as they should, steering amateur designers in the right direction without locking them in. Moreover, the "blank canvas" option actually comes with its own array of background images (with opacity slider, of course), stickers, text tools, in addition to the ability to add images. You can send objects backward or forward, and eke out some real graphic design prowess, should you be so inclined.

In handling image uploading, Mixbook sped through a batch of fairly high-resolution photos surprisingly quickly. If you don't have images locally stored, you can also pull them from Instagram, Facebook, Flickr, PhotoBucket, Picasa, and SmugMug. Other services offer connectivity to most of those, but I haven't seen too many connect to Instagram, and it's a welcome addition.

All the images you import go into a bin on the left side of the screen, and a checkmark icon appears on each one after you place it in your project, helping you keep track of which images have and have not been used.

When designing a photo wall calendar in Mixbook, I could choose on which month to start as well as pen in special dates, standard options on most other sites, too. But here's yet another bonus: Mixbook lets you import a list of holidays, then tick only the ones you want to appear on your calendar.

Elegant and Easy
If you're not a professional designer, Mixbook is an excellent option for making your next photo wall calendars, custom greeting cards, and photo books. The options are plentiful, as are the editing tools, and the service just works the way it should. In my experience, Shutterfly delivers a slightly high quality finished product, but I certainly wasn't complaining about the results with Mixbook. Price-wise, Mixbook fits right in with all the other big names, like CafePress, Zazzle, and Snapfish, although shipping costs a little more. I ordered a calendar on a Monday, with the expected delivery date nine business days later, although it arrived well ahead of schedule (about five business days early). The option to tack on $6.95 for rush shipping would have only moved up the expected delivery date by one day. C'est la vie, though, because Mixbook's service is well worth the time if you have it.

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