MILK Books are a New Zealand based company who make gorgeous photo books. They recently teamed up with Moleskine, a company known for their legendary notebooks to create something quite spectacular; the Moleskine + MILK photo books.
The specific product that I’m reviewing is the Moleskine Photo Album with the ‘Contemporary’ theme, a black cover and 60 pages.
Creation of the Photo Books
I’ve had previous bad experiences with creating photo books, with clunky Windows-only desktop software and half-baked web interfaces leading to a horrible photo book. These photo books are created on MILK’s website, the interface and usability is much better than any photo book company I’ve used before, but still not perfect.
My main quibble with it is that the builder is built in Adobe Flash which will disappoint some of you Flash-haters, but I’m told that a mobile app solution is a priority for them.
Importing
The painless process of importing photographs to their book builder can be done at any point in the book-building process, and there is no shortage of options about where to import your photos from. The options are to upload from your computer, Facebook, Flickr or Picasa.
Uploading from Facebook is a really neat feature, it’s ideal for those who use it as somewhat of a journal, uploading albums of photos from important events or even just general pictures. It would be great if I could import from 500px, though. Especially because a lot of the big players are moving over to 500px from Flickr.
Design
There are several options in the creation of your Moleskine photo album. The colour of the cover, you can choose from either black or a light brown shade. There is a label on the front of the book and on the photo album, also on the box case. I didn’t notice the tab to edit the box case label because the little tab isn’t very pronounced in the UI, so mine came without it. The third design option is text and colour, here you choose the text theme and colour scheme of your book.
Layout
The books already have a pre-built layout inside them in the editor, for speed you can adhere to this or you can change each page’s layout individually. You have 24 layouts to choose from, plus a couple more if you choose to have half of a photo on each page creating a full-page spread. There’s even options to have a full page of text for those who have a real story to tell.
To create a full page spread, just find the dimensions of one page of your photo book and double the width, crop your photo to be these dimensions then put it onto both pages and pull it all the way left on the right and all the way right on the left.
Pro tip: the square books are 1×1 or 1×2 for two pages.
Collaboration
Arguably the best additional feature ever, collaboration lets you work with friends and family on your photo book. And as a host, you need to approve each change they make; non-destructive photo book editing! This is an amazing feature for creating photo books after special events like Christmas, especially when your family aren’t together. Think of it as distance-scrapbooking.
Sharing
Using Facebook, Twitter, or email, you can share the first 10 pages of your photo book with friends, family and followers.
With your order, you also get a free downloadable PDF flip-book, download mine here.
The Photo Album
Delivery
It took a couple of weeks for the photo album to be delivered to me. It was shipped via FedEx in their largest mail bag. The bag containing the photo album arrived looking suitably weathered, but with no real signs of damage, and the package inside was in pristine condition.
Presentation
Of course, the photo album wasn’t just stuffed inside the FedEx mailer. It was inside a cardboard box with a neat sticker with my address on it, and inside that was a matte paper container. To open, one simply peels off a sticker and the gorgeous fabric of the box case is revealed.
The box case is great for presentation, but also storage. It opens much like a book and has padded foam inside, this can be adjusted according to how many extra pages you add to your book. On the front of this book, you can have a custom message printed; especially useful if you happen to find yourself collecting quite a few.
Quality
You expect the photo albums to be superb quality right from spending $130 on it, so it is no surprise that the box case containing the album is made from super-thick card and is obviously made to last. It is covered with soft-textured fabric in either black or light brown and has the elasticated band holding it closed, exactly like you find on Moleskine notebooks.
The book itself sure has a great aesthetic to it, and pulling it out of the box case with a ribbon is an exciting experience to see your work take on a physical form.
At first, I was somewhat disappointed by how thin the book is after pulling it out of the ~1” thick box, but I did get the base photo album with 60 pages. They are expandable up to a huge 200 pages.
The Moleskine photo album itself has the same textured gloss finish as Moleskine notebooks, and also has the same Moleskine logo. It even has the details to fill in on the first page in case of loss, and in the back is an expandable pocket containing the history of Moleskine. This is a fantastic collaboration between Moleskine and MILK.
On the front of the album is your chosen label text and a photo of your choice, this is a great idea, but I found that it’s not implemented in the highest quality fashion. There is a noticeable edge around the print that has been stuck on a lightly indented part of the front cover, and on mine there was a slight loose edge. Out of everyone I’ve shown the album to I was the only one to notice this, so it isn’t necessarily a gigantic issue.
The print quality inside the album is generally perfect and true to my colour-calibrated devices. The paper stock used in the albums and books is ivory-coloured fine matte. Details have been revealed fantastically and none of them seem over-sharpened, which can be a problem with some printers who assume that the client hasn’t already sharpened for print. The only issues I have with the quality is that in places, there seems to be additional noise compared to how it shows on my screen. This is usually in areas with a gradient which changes shade rather than colour which makes it mostly obvious in black and white photographs.
This is page 32 of the PDF:
Conclusion
With an easy to use builder and high-quality finished product, I think that the photo album is completely worth the $130 investment, and books are available for as little as $50. They are great for capturing memories permanently, especially Christmases, birthdays and other special occasions. View the whole range of Moleskine + MILK books and albums here.
Giveaway
And now you have the opportunity to have a Landscape Moleskine + MILK Photobook (worth $50) for yourself, with your own pictures! We’re giving away three in the form of gift vouchers.
Update: The giveaway has now ended. The winners have been notified!
There are a few options to enter:
- Retweet this tweet:
A great collaboration between two awesome companies; @moleskine and @milkbooks And we giveaway 3 landscape photo books! previousmagazine.com/photo-album-mo…
— Previous Magazine (@PreviousMag) January 4, 2013
- Comment on this article (be sure to use a valid email address so we can notify you)
- our page between now and Friday the 11th of January
- If none of these are possible for whatever reason, email craig@previousmagazine.com
Winners will be randomly selected on Friday the 11th of January and notified over Twitter, email or Facebook.
){kind=link}
I discovered this Moleskine + Milk collaboration recently and was looking for someone who had a detailed review of what the final product was. This is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks.
Great giveaway! Retweeted & liked your FB page.
Love this collaboration. It’s a reminder of how significant self-publishing has become. A win for both Milk and Moleskine.
The milk and moleskine combination looks amazing – great attention to detail from both companies makes for a well-designed product. Thanks for sharing.
Thank you for the review. The product looks amazing. I’m planning on making one as a gift.
Awesome giveaway! I’ve retweeted and i’ve also liked your page on fb! 🙂
Cool concept. I like Moleskine so I imagine this would be a cool product, too.
Any sort of real specifications for files/sizes are nowhere to be found. Found it impossible to use full frame images without going into Photoshop and extending the canvas, they force you to crop into your pictures like you’re an incompetent amateur who has extraneous junk on the edges of their photos. Kind of a dumb oversight or perhaps a too heavy hand in thinking that we’re idiots? The picture window layout choices are not well suited to 2×3 35mm proportions. Also the Flash interface is just too precious and pretentious, they really should can that altogether.
In other words, it’s still better than the other online photo book options because the other places are even worse! ;-p Looking forward to seeing how they handle B&W. For $20 it’s hard to beat, just do a quickee of kids pix.
Just received my first two moleskine classic printed books in the post – two copies of the same book. Utterly disappointed.
1) Colour calibration was perfect on one, horrendous on the other with a cyan tint making black and white images look green (I know it was not my fault because one of the books was fine!)
2) Binding was bad. One of the books wasn’t even straight. Both of them had at least one page where the binding came too far into the page, showing the threads and glue spots in a very untidy way.
3) Page creases – including the front cover (also the sticker on the front cover looks lame and I don’t see it remaining intact). Sadly 3 pages on the correctly colour calibrated book were creased diagonally across the pages.
4) The edges of the pages looked and felt like they had been cut with a blunt saw.
5) Black ink smudges on two corners – where is the quality control?
6) Poor finish of the bookmark (not cut with a heated implement as the regular moleskine notebooks are, so the photobook bookmark is already showing signs of fray).
Holding a normal moleskin in your hand, the quality does feel inferior in the photobooks. I love moleskine and have used them for years. It’s such a brilliant idea to have moleskine photobooks but they have not produced it well, the actual product you feel in your hands is certainly not the moleskine quality I was expecting.
For the price I certainly won’t be ordering any more until the quality improves.
That’s very unusual, have you tried contacting MILK regarding the way that it arrived? After all, that is quite unacceptable and of “unmerchantable quality”. Everyone else I know who has ordered have had no issues, myself included.
Beware of this company. Poor quality such as binding issues, fonts that won’t print properly, glue dripped on pages, color problems and promises to reprint never materialized. Now I’m out $75 and hours of work. Moleskine should not lend their name to such a shady operation.
Perhaps things have changed in the past few years? Have you contacted them about the problem? And do you have any photographs of this so we can see too? I’ve been thinking about ordering a photo book for myself lately.
I’ve had several of the Moleskine books printed. The print quality of the books was very good but I had to have two reprints done because of the cover quality. Unlike the Photo Book Plus, I went with the option that allows for a cover photo. Whatever process they’re using to adhere the cover photo is, in my opinion, lousy. The photo inlay on 2 out of 3 books I ordered was peeling off. Their customer service was great about accommodating me, but I was left truly disappointed. I hope they come up with a better method for photo covers.
Gerald
http://www.geraldpatrickpho…