CUSTOM FAMILY GIFTS MADE FROM YOUR PHOTOS

Almost every family gift starts with the same discovery. You go looking for one photograph with all of you in it, and there isn't one. Somebody was taking the picture. Somebody else was working that weekend. The one from four years ago has a person in it who is no longer part of the family.

This is so common that it is the normal case rather than the exception, and it does not stop the gift. Send separate photographs of each person and say roughly how you want them arranged. The layout is built before the preview goes out, so you are approving an actual arrangement rather than describing one and hoping.

Mixed years and mixed cameras

A family collage usually mixes a scanned print from the nineties with a phone photo from last week. Colours and sharpness will differ, and we balance them as far as the files allow. In practice that mixture reads as history rather than as a mistake, which is part of why these work.

Including somebody who has died

Done frequently, and it is one of the reasons families order these at all. Send their photograph with the others and say where in the layout they should sit. Mention it in the notes and the file is handled personally rather than going through the usual queue.

This is the only genuine constraint on a family gift and it is worth knowing before you send fourteen photographs.

A single group photograph holds as many people as were standing there, because it prints as it is. A collage is different, because each image gets a share of a fixed surface.

• 20 cm: one photograph only. A collage at this size is unreadable
• 40 cm: up to four images and still legible from across a room
• 60 cm: up to nine, which is the practical ceiling

Past nine each face is smaller than a thumbnail and the object stops reading as photographs of particular people. It becomes a pattern. For a large family, the better answer is usually several pillows rather than one crowded one, and since there is no minimum order and no bulk tier, five cost five times one.

Layout options are covered in more detail at custom photo pillow.

Grandparents

The largest single group. Grandparents are difficult to buy for precisely because they have reached the point of buying only what they need. A printed photograph of grandchildren needs no charging, no app, no subscription and no explanation, which puts it ahead of most modern gifts by default.

A parent whose children have left

The year somebody leaves for university is the year this gift lands hardest, in both directions. One for the parent, and one for the student, who takes it to a room they have not decorated yet.

The family pet, for the whole household

One present that four people are pleased about, which solves the harder problem of buying a single gift for a household. Cut to the animal's outline it stops looking like a cushion. See custom pet pillow.

Reunions and big birthdays

For a seventieth or a family reunion, a collage covering decades does something a single photograph cannot. It shows the span. Other formats are compared at custom pillows, and shapes at custom shaped pillows.

• Custom Christmas gifts, when the whole family is in one room anyway
• Custom gifts for her, for a mother or grandmother specifically
• Custom gifts for him, for a father or grandfather specifically
• Custom couple gifts, when it is two people rather than a household
• Custom pillows, every shape and size we print