Shining Land
Welcome to the first (semi) sponsored post in this blog! I often received ads from Saal Digital, a German company that sells photo products online. That is, photo albums, posters, calendars, cards, you name it. The deal on the ad was quite straightforward. They offer a 40 € discount code for a photo album if one in turns writes an honest review of the product. And what you are reading now, is that review :) Apparently they do have some selection process, but I applied just with the URL of the photography section of this blog and it worked! I decided to design a photo book based on my trip to Sri Lanka, which I received this week.
The good things. I am very happy with the result. The photo book is very well made and the quality is definitely high enough for me as a photography enthusiast. I am sure a professional photographer would find some defect, but I think that the result is unbeatable for the price. Also, production time was incredibly fast. I submitted the final design on a Sunday evening and on Tuesday I already had the photo book at home. Saal Digital also offers a very easy to use software that takes care of everything. It shows all the available options, the prices, offers advice, and submits the job once the design is finished.
In the software, it was not very clear to me where exactly the spine of the book starts
The not-so-great things. The software, again. While it is easy to use and a great alternative to the web-based design tool, it has some limitations. For instance, it offers multiple layout styles, but resets to the default on each new page of the album. Also, most of the styles are rather questionable. To sell, I do understand that they have to cater to the bad taste that unfortunately is so widespread, but at least they could guide the users away from poor clip-arts. The tool to edit text is also rather basic and apparently only supports a limited set of fonts. I only used it for the book title, but even for that it was not easy to use.
The book is bound in a way that pages can lie flat, allowing pictures to span both pages
Conclusion. Saal Digital offers great products at a very reasonable price. Actually, a few months ago I was about to order a calendar from them even without the discount code, but then got a bit frustrated with their web-based design tool. While their software is also limited, it is definitely the better approach!