Designing albums

Designing albums is not my most favorite part of my job but it is something I take pride in doing that myself. I’m also very happy that I achieved to cut back my album design time tremendously. A huge help there were bookproofr.com and Photojunction.

I’ll let you in on my workflow…

Step 1: The couple helps me by rating the pictures from their slideshow via bookproofr.com. That way I get a good understanding of what kind of pictures they would like to see included in the album. I don’t have to wonder about my decisions. (how important is city hall, do they prefer to see more pictures of themselves or do they want more family pictures, do they prefer color over black & white, are detail shots important to them, etc..). All of my decision making is already done when I selected their slideshow pictures. There isn’t one picture in there I rather not see showing up in the finished product aka “The Album”.
Step 2: Photojunction My #1 album making tool. I like my spread designs clean. No image-in-image , no heavy collage. Each spread tells a story about a specific moment of their day. I like pictures to stand out on the page so I include lots of whitespace around them. Of course, a couple of full bleeds can’t be missing from the album … A typical album is around 22-25 spreads.
Step 3: Album proposal : Again I upload everything to bookproofr.com and I allow couples to give feedback and approve the album. It’s also a way to include your clients in the whole process. (FYI the most spreads I ever had to change was 3)
Step 4: Once everything is approved I upload the spreads to KISS (and wait for customs to clear my parcel)

And since I don’t tend to be secret about my designs: here is the full & final version of Sofie & Jeroen their wedding album. I’ll show you some pictures of the finished kick-ass “forbidden green” leather KISS next time. (cause the première should be for their eyes first)