Anatomy of an album design
Mon, Jul 19, 2010Album design can be daunting when you first start designing albums. How do you design an album spread, much less an entire album?
If you take a deep breath and separate it into small steps, designing albums can be as easy as baking a cake. The first thing to do is choose images that will tell a story. When you are going through a wedding, choose images that will tell the story of the entire day. I usually go through a wedding and pair down to 80-100 images and put them into a completely different folder. Then I’ll scroll through the thumbnails of all those images a couple of times to really cement the story in my head.
Once I start designing I just keep in mind one single principal. Main image and supporting images. It’s all about finding the main image for a page and then finding images that support that one main image.
On the left here, I have one main image, a fantastic shot of the bride from below, showing off her beautiful wedding dress. This was one of the bride’s favorite shots from the wedding and was featured on Oregon Bride Magazine. Why? It shows off her dress. For you guy photographers out there. The dress is important!
Once you decide on that main image (usually, I place one main image on one side of the page) it is just a matter of making the supporting images fit on the other page.
One key to creating nice albums is to make sure your supporting images fit. If I had placed images of the couple inside dancing along with this main image, it wouldn’t have worked. The album design works because everything is related.
And the bonus? Once you start designing like this, you start shooting better for your albums and your albums just get better and better!
Fundy, over and out…
