When I was in college I made a portfolio through Blurb. I also needed a copy Right Now—so I spent 14 hours in a Kinkos trying to finagle their printers into working properly, getting the color right, getting them to print onto nice paper, etc.
When I went for design interviews in SF I'd bring a Blurb book and an iPad. Nine times out of eleven the interviewer was more impressed by the book.
@willimholte that's a great idea. One of the visual designers we hired at PlayHaven brought in a book and illustrations. It made a good impression on me.
The problem with all these platforms / software is that they don't deal with the primary problem that self-published indie authors have: we need a simple way to design a book, and then easily export it to PDF, Mobi, ePub. I'm (personally) not as interested in the marketplaces.
@OsmnShkh@mijustin —I've got a passing interest in this as well, would love to know what tools you guys think are currently the best. (My layout experience is heavily in the world of InDesign, which is not optimal for much)
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@mijustin - Blurb's new BookWright platform lets you easily design the book with templates, and you can export to PDF and ebook.
I just used Blurb to create a photo book for a friend and I'm impressed with the result. I got a lovely, colorful booklet with nice paper and a good quality printout and it was relatively fun and easy to design the book. There are some little kinks with the ux, like having trouble finding the saved version of my book, or not being able to delete unwanted photos, and changing existing templates. It also crashed unexpectedly several times but was able to save the changes I made. I paid extra shipping to have it delivered within 10 days and it arrived much earlier. I'm happy.
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