Back in 2008 I created a photobook to document our baby girl and the joys we were experiencing as new parents and titled it happiness is.  I eventually turned it in into an album kit and to this day, it’s still one of my best selling digital kits. Over the years I’ve seen people use it to document a wide range of life events – from weddings to everyday life moments.

Today, I am beyond thrilled to announce that the Happiness Is photobook style is now available at Shutterfly.

Earlier this year Shutterfly launched a new photobooking component called custom path, which I can best describe to you as a platform that introduces photoshop-esque control to your photobook designing process. In custom path, you now have the ability to change backgrounds, resize photo frames, swap out (or resize) embellishments, adapt layout designs, etc. This really takes the art of photobooking to an all new level and it is especially great news for those of you that want to create a custom photobook, but don’t have the time (or desire) to learn photoshop.

Here’s a closer look at the happiness is style and a quick overview of what you can do using shutterfly’s custom path tools.

1. Predesigned Pages  The happiness is photobook style comes with 20 predesigned pages and a matching front, back and spine design. For those of you familiar with photoshop and digital kits – these layouts are like quick pages except better because you have the ability to change the background color, remove or add text, embellishments and even change the layout completely.

2. Customizable Design Tools  Your custom path design tools can be found in the tabs (layouts, backgrounds, embellishments) on the left side of the page.

3. Journaling Help  The text spaces are pre-filled with journaling ideas that you can easily customize to fit your project.

Just click in the text area and this text box will pop up. In here you can further customize – change the text, change the font, the size, the color.

4. Idea Pages I really like this (new to me) category. If you get stuck working on a certain layout, you can click on the idea pages tab to pull up sample pages showcasing the layout design and it also suggests alternate page designs.

Shutterfly just launched 29 new photobook styles.

– see all new styles (especially loving Ali Edwards’ Top 10 Book)

– see happiness is style

I also have two photobook styles that will be available at the beginning of 2012. I’m super excited about those. Working with Shutterfly has been absolutely amazing, thrilling, and just a downright surreal experience.

I hope you enjoy perusing the new photobook styles. If you have any questions regarding the custom path platform, I’ll do my best to answer them.