DIY: Baby Shower Guest Book

A few months ago I was asked to help plan a baby shower. In planning the shower we wanted to find activities to entertain the guests and ways for each of the guests to leave their special mark on the shower. A perfect way to make everyone feel involved and give the parents to be great keepsake from the shower is by creating an advice filled baby shower guestbook. There are many many formats for this; words of wisdom for the baby as he/she grows up, advice for the parents to be, or just a normal guestbook.

My finished guestbook card

Here are the basic steps of how I designed, created, and produced my own (cost effective) guest book.

STEP 1:  The first thing I did was RESEARCH. This might seem extreme, but I was at a loss of where to start... do you buy guestbooks at stationary stores, book stores, online? I had no idea. If you are looking for a nice blank notebook for people to write it, then any of the above locations will have what you need. For a baby shower specific guestbook I found that only party supply stores and online guestbook stores seem to carry them. Etsy also carries a variety of more customizable guestbooks.


My favorites guestbooks were the ones with advice either for the new baby or the parents to be. Some books had 8 1/2" by 11" pages that are inserted to a binder. After buying the book plus the pages to go in it the price starts to adds up. Other books came already binded together, but the set amount of 20 or 25 pages were not enough for the shower we were throwing.

Ultimately I decided that the best option for our shower would be cards that could be handed out to each person to write while at their seat. The cards could then be put into a photo album purchased at any store.


STEP 2: DESIGNING the cards. I knew from my research roughly the fields I wanted to include. For the baby shower advice card I wanted a title, lines for guests to write advice, and a dedicated line for the guest's name (so no one would forget). I also knew I wanted some fun fields, but wasn't sure what I'd have room for yet.

Additionally I had color parameters. The shower theme and the baby nursery's colors were light green and purple. I had already received the invitation for the shower and used this as my inspiration.

The invitation was my inspiration. (Note I removed personal information from the shower invitation which is the cause for its odd wording.)

STEP 3: MAKE IT. While I consider myself to be computer literate, I am by no means a graphic designer, nor do I have access to high end design software. To design my cards I used Open Office Draw. A portion of the free Open Office Suite which I had downloaded to my computer long ago.

I first started by FORMATTING the "Page Setup" for an index card the size of a standard photograph (in my case 6"x4"). I prefer starting at the correct size and exporting it at a 100% scale. (Contradictorily my fiance prefers to do things at larger formats and scale them down post processing to preserve the quality of digital pictures.)

Input the page setup parameters you want your finished product to be.

Next I started to CREATE TEXT BOXES so that I'd have an idea of the size and spacing of each field that would be needed on the card.

Start by adding important fields to get an idea of spacing and arrangement.

 For simple GRAPHICS  I tried to reply on the program as much as possible. Lots of fonts, line types, arrows, and simple shapes can be easily drawn using tools provided.

Playing around with provided shape tools.

Lastly I wanted to make it look POLISHED. Color is an easy way to do this. The software has lots of pre-made color gradients that can be dropped in.

Sample card that took less than 10 minutes to make.

For the baby shower card I used some speech bubble graphics from an Open Office tool. I also added a simply circle to be the baby's head for a sketch. The biggest help I can offer to make the card look polished is to understand LAYERING.  The layers on the card I designed are as follows. The bottom layer is solid green (and it actually is placed through the entire card area), above is a layer with purple purple circles. All the circles I used are full, there was no need to trim them because anything outside the print area simply won't get printed. The next layer up was a white box. This white box defines the area to be written in and hides the green background and purple circles. Finally the top layers are all the fields inside the white box.

My finished design.

Step 4.  PRINTING it. I did a bit a research for this, as I haven't had much printed online before. I considered lots of printing websites (moo, altavisa) as well as just walking my design down the street and having it printed at Kinkos. I decided to have it printed online because of the easy to have pages other than standard letter size printed. I also considered using a photo printing website (shutterfly, snapfish, york), but was concerned that a glossy finish would make the card un-writtable.

I ultimately ended up using a site called Uprinting.com. This was a slight gamble because I knew nothing about them or their reputation. However they had a simple option for cardstock index cards with a matte finish. I was happy with the overall cards, but I'm sure other websites would have provided similar service if I had keep searching.

Uprinting uses PDF formatting, so I had to EXPORT or save my open office draw document as a .pdf to upload to their website.

PDF format of the finished card.

The finished printed card next to a quarter.

Step 5. Putting it all together. I also needed a PHOTO ALBUM. I searched a few stores and found my favorite to be from Barnes and Noble. The criteria I was looking for was that it had photo pockets, could hold at least 100 photos/ advice cards, and that it was a green or purple baby theme.

Photo album from Barnes and Noble.

The finished album turned out very cute, and while the cards aren't the most professional quality ever everyone at the shower enjoyed filling them out and was touched by the personal effort that went into making them.