Creating your own wedding album design can be such a difficult task. Your wedding photographer might have handed you over a USB stick with up to 1000 photographs on it! Or, worse {just my personal opinion}, you might have received a download link of your photographs. Which means to start choosing your photographs for your wedding album design, you’ve got to sieve through each photograph on your laptop screen. And when there’s 500+ images, that’s a timely task! And that’s why for my clients who purchase a Wedding Photography Collection with an album, we have a ‘Viewing Session’ and I provide them with a ‘Proof Book’. It just makes the whole selection process so much easier!
So, to help to make this task a more enjoyable one, I’ve come up with 6 tips to help you with your wedding album design…
1. Be realistic with your number of photographs
Your wedding album is essentially a document of your wedding day, but it’s also a storybook. You want a great selection of photographs that tell the story of YOUR day through visual images. And this works better if the design is done effectively too {I’ll come to that shortly}. So I suggest for a 10-spread album, that you choose between 45-55 {max} number of photographs. If you really want more photographs, up the number of spreads.
2. Choose a blend of posed and candid photographs
To ensure you get the ‘story’ narrative, choose both posed and candid {more natural} shots, so that there is a blend of the two throughout your album. That way the content won’t appear too stiff and will definitely create a narrative to your story.
3. Break your day up into sections
Break your day up into sections; for eg. ‘Getting Ready’, ‘Details’, ‘Ceremony’, ‘Groups of family & friends {including bridal party}’, ‘Speeches’, Couple Shots’ etc. Then choose a certain number for each. For the purpose of this example, I’d suggest between 4-7 for each. {Yep – that’s where it becomes difficult choosing!}
4. Order your photographs starting with your most favourite
When choosing these particular shots, prioritise which you want most by ordering them in a list starting with your most favourite; for eg. Getting Ready – 6, 8, 2, 15, 1. Number 6 would be your most favourite and therefore may be considered for a larger photograph in the layout design, whereas 1 would be smaller. This is a simple but effective method I use with my wedding clients and makes the design stage that bit easier.
5. Simple and consistent layout
It’s important the layout is simple and consistent. Your album will have more impact if you have different sized photographs throughout. So for example, if included a full group shot in your selection, this would look far better to cover one whole spread {two pages} rather than as a tiny photograph.
6. Finishing touches
Finish your beautiful wedding album off with a colour cover that works with your wedding colours. So if you had pastel shades in your flowers, bridesmaid’s dresses and groomsman wear, then a similar pastel shade would work perfectly to bring the whole wedding album together. It’s these finishing touches that really make a difference.
I LOVE designing wedding albums. And because I have some excellent software that allows me to be flexible with design, I can really make sure that I offer my clients a great design layout right through their album. With my Wedding Photography Collections that include an album, they not only receive a wedding proof book {to ease that narrowing down selection process}, a Wedding Album Design Guide {similar to this}, but I also design up to three drafts. Usually by the second draft, we’ve got it! Clients approve and I send it off to an amazing professional lab that prints and creates the wedding album.
And vwa-lah! One perfect wedding album. And a happy couple!
If you are still searching for your Lincolnshire based {and a little further} wedding photographer and like what you see and read, then please get in touch so we can chat all things wedding!
Smile, Jeni x
Jeni Lowe Photography
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