Chatbooks Brand Guidelines: A 2014 Utah Photo-Book App Built on Subscriptions

A Utah start-up built around automatic books.

Chatbooks is an American photo-book company based in Utah. Its own about page quotes co-founder Vanessa Quigley: “We started Chatbooks in 2014 as a small family affair,” and names Nate Quigley as chief executive and co-founder. Forbes, interviewing Vanessa Quigley in February 2017, gave the same founding year and described Chatbooks as a Utah-based company of about 100 people, selling automated photo books by subscription through an app and a website, and quoted the company’s aim of helping people “hold on to what matters.”

The starting idea was narrow. The company says the founders already posted family pictures on Instagram and wanted to know whether those posts could be turned into photo books automatically. In the Forbes interview, Vanessa Quigley said Nate Quigley already had a small development team working on another project, that the team agreed to change course, and that within a week it had a prototype app that printed Instagram pictures in a book. She also said the young company’s main early problem was a lack of capital, and that books began selling quickly once it officially launched, which let it hire staff and raise more money. Forbes wrote at the time that the company meant to put its funding toward marketing, new products and expansion into international markets.

Chatbooks has stayed in Utah. Its current privacy policy gives a mailing address for Chatbooks, Inc. in Lehi, Utah, and its terms of service, last updated in May 2026, are governed by Utah law. The about page says that more than 150 people now work at the company, from software developers to “the hard-working crews in the print shop,” and that part of its customer support is handled by part-time, stay-at-home parents in different parts of the United States.

Monthbooks, minis and layflats.

From the start, Chatbooks sold a habit as much as a product. Its website splits the range into subscription books — Monthbooks, Monthly Minis and Baby’s First Year — and non-subscription books, including the Classic Photo Book and the Luxury Layflat, alongside photo prints and Sticky Prints. The company presents the subscription as a way to “free your photos from your phone” by printing on a regular schedule, and offers subscribers personal help through a service it calls CB Studio.

Tom’s Guide reviewed a Chatbooks photo book in November 2025. Its specification list gave softcover and hardcover options, cover colours of white, grey and a dark blue, square sizes of 6, 8 and 10 inches, and books of 20 to 366 pages, made either in the app or on the website. The reviewer found that the software placed uploaded pictures onto pages automatically, that captions and the date a picture was taken could be added, and that layout options were deliberately limited; the subscription could deliver four, six or twelve books a year. The reviewer worked in the web editor, used collage patterns to vary the pages and described the app as the more streamlined of the two; the review gave standard delivery as up to 11 days, including three to five days to print, and the subscription books it described were 5 by 7 inch softcovers.

The brand’s voice has been shaped as much by advertising as by product. Forbes reported in February 2017 that a Chatbooks marketing video aimed at busy parents had reached three million views in its first two days and 58 million in total, and that the company was following it with a campaign urging mothers to “Get In The Photo.” The Daily Universe, the Brigham Young University newspaper, reported in February 2017 that the video makers the Harmon Brothers were known for their Chatbooks videos, among others.

The result is a photo-book brand that talks about everyday life rather than special occasions alone. The site still has an occasions menu — weddings, travel, babies, yearbooks and holidays — but the subscription books are named after units of time: the month and the first year.

Design and documentation.

Photo-book and photo-printing services sell something the customer has already made: the pictures. Their own sites therefore tend to lead with the customer’s photographs rather than with the company. Home pages show open books, framed prints and wall pieces in ordinary rooms, often styled around an occasion such as a wedding, a new baby, a holiday or the end of a year, and the product sits in the frame as a finished keepsake.

The making itself is shown through the tools. Most of these companies offer an online editor and a phone app, and they describe both in plain, step-by-step language: upload, choose a size and cover, arrange the pages, order. Automatic layouts, themes and templates are presented as time-savers, while desktop editors with grids, rulers and finer controls are offered to people who want to place every picture themselves.

Product naming follows the physical object. Ranges are sorted by format, page count, binding and cover — soft cover, hard cover, fabric, leather, lay-flat — and by paper finish, with words such as matte, lustre or gloss doing most of the work. Wall pieces are named by their material, from stretched cotton and acrylic to metal, wood and framed prints, so the label tells the buyer what will hang on the wall.

Behind the consumer brands sit the labs and the owners. Corporate pages explain which group a label belongs to, where its printing sites are and how its brands divide up the countries they serve, while lab-led services describe their printing methods and papers in more detail. For a designer, the useful lessons are in that split: a warm, occasion-led consumer voice on top, and a precise, material-led vocabulary underneath.

A family voice for a phone-first product.

Chatbooks frames its purpose in family terms. The about page states its mission as “to strengthen and connect families,” and the chief executive’s letter there says the company hopes customers will think of it not as “a company” but as real people, and that however much it grows it is determined to “stay small.” The same plain tone runs through the product names: the home page calls the subscription a habit that “gets the job done.” Gifts sit in their own menu, with gift subscriptions, a Baby’s First Year gift and gift cards.

The website, privacy policy and terms of service all name Chatbooks, Inc., and the about page lists Nate Quigley as chief executive and co-founder. The company refers to its own print-shop crews, and its books are ordered through the Chatbooks app or the website.

For a design guide, Chatbooks shows how a photo-book brand can be built around a routine rather than a single gift: small square books, plain product names and a family voice carried from the about page into its advertising. Compare Artifact Uprising, another American photo-book brand with its own look, and Mixbook, a Californian online photo-book editor. For this guide we use deep teal, cream and a warm coral with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Chatbooks’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.