Making Your Own Wedding Album - Advice from a Bride

This is a guest post from Annabel, whose wedding I photographed in 2008.
(*My comments are in parentheses.) ;-)

A few weeks ago, Anne asked me if any of the pictures from my 2008 wedding ever ended up in an album. Oh boy, did they. What they ended up in is a hardbound 11 x 13 wedding album nay, volume, with a glossy dust jacket and hundreds of wedding photos spread out over 126 glorious, premium-papered pages. And the only thing more crazy than having such a hefty, museum-quality wedding album, is the fact that I did it all myself.
(*Anne: From my perspective, the paper & print quality is decent for what is available to the general public. However, as a professional I have access to much more archival quality album options, but better quality does come at premium.)

Now I know that making your own wedding album might not sound all that crazy to the average Jill, but if you’ve ever done a project like this, you might recognize that this is a task meant for only the truly ambitious (read: mentally ill) brides and/or grooms among us. Remember your high school yearbook? It was, what? 60 pages? There were probably fifteen kids on the staff killing themselves to put it out at the end of the year. And they didn’t even have jobs! So before you embark on a project like making your own album, you must ask yourself, are you feeling equal to fifteen over-achieving teenagers?

Me? I have no regrets. My wedding album is an heirloom I treasure and it’s beautiful. I’m not the only one who thinks so, either. We bought copies for all of our parents- and my mother, no kidding, makes people wash their hands before they touch it. Her friends may roll their eyes but they’re lucky she hasn’t put it in a glass case, turning only one page a day, like those illuminated manuscripts in museums. I can’t blame her- while I’ve yet to frame a single wedding picture, my giantess of an album sits propped up on a bookshelf in my living room just waiting for the day when I can afford museum lighting.
(*Anne: Storing albums with this many pages upright might cause the binding to become loose, unless it's propped on a book stand that allows the book to lean back, stay closed, or lay open with the binding sinking into the spine instead of the pages pulling on the binding. Storing flat is the best way to preserve the binding.)

Recognizing that what the mentally ill really need is a forum on which to communicate their crazy notions, Anne has asked me to share my experiences making my own album with her blog readers. So here we go!
(*Anne: Annabel is completely sane, and extremely creative. ;-)

Lets start with the cons:

• It takes a lot of time - I made my album when I had what some people might call “free time” but also goes by the name “life-crippling underemployment.” I don’t know that I would have had the time to devote to making as nice an album if that hadn’t been the case. Altogether, I bet I spent forty hours or more on it during this time. Even if you’re only doing a simple and short album with no fancy layouts, I promise you, this is going to take at least a day or two of your life. Narrowing down your photos alone will take several hours. Uploading high-res photos, laying them out, dealing with the inevitable technical glitches, and proofing your album will take up what will start to seem like an infinitely expanding amount of time. If this sounds awful to you, pay someone else to deal with those frustrations for you. If this sounds like fun to you- welcome to my club! Drinks are in the kitchen and you can hang your straight jacket on the hat rack.
(*Anne: even when I do the initial design for couples, it can take weeks or even months for them to look at the album design enough times to decide what changes they want to make!)

• It’s not necessarily cheaper – Although I knew Anne would make a great album, I wanted to do my own. I designed my album on blurb.com, which is a fantastic site where you can lay out and print your own high quality hardcover books. You have to download their layout software program onto your computer (the program is free) and then upload your album to the site. My large format, 126 page album, ended up costing roughly $100 per copy. Considering the time I spent on it and the cost of printing, I doubt it really made financial sense to do it myself. Remember that life-crippling unemployment I was talking about? After I made my album, I couldn’t actually afford to purchase it until a month later when we could afford it. Still, for me it was worth the time, the cost, and the wait.
(*Anne: Doing the math- if Annabel's album took her a week, and if she had a job that earned her $1000 per week, than her album cost her $1100... luckily she was able to spend time instead of cash.)

• Technology is frustrating – I have little bit of a background as a graphic artist and so was prepared for the technical part of creating my own album. If you are easily frustrated with technology, putting together your own album may not be for you. There’s a definite learning curve with the software on most of these book design sites. If you’re someone who picks up new technology easily and have a speedy computer with plenty of space for your photos and plenty of processing power for the software, then you’re in good shape. If not, you might want to pay someone to do it and save yourself the hassle. Sometimes the photos don’t load properly and you have to start all over again, sometimes the blurb.com software is glitchy (though to their credit they are always updating it and their customer service was great when I used it a year ago), and sometimes malevolent elves crawl into your computer and screw things up for no reason at all. That last one is almost guaranteed, trust me.
(*Anne: Agreed!! Stuff happens ALL THE TIME to delay what feels like should be a simple & quick process!)

And now, some tips

• Think about design – Before I started my album on Blurb, I looked through some of the public wedding albums on there and they were all kind of, let’s see how do I say this nicely?: terrible. Well, I guess there wasn’t a way to say that nicely at all, huh? It’s not that the people making the albums were terrible, it’s just that our first instinct is to try to get as many photos into as few pages as possible. Economical? Yes. Pretty? Not so much. That kind of design leads to a really hectic-looking and amateurish product. Instead of looking at other wedding albums, try looking through some of the books the professional photographers have made to show off their portfolios on Blurb or in your local bookstore. Use their ideas to organize your album and make it the piece of art it deserves to be. These people know how to use white space to draw the eye in and to use design to create a feeling. If you have ten pictures of people going nuts on the dance floor, put ‘em all on one page and let it feel crowded and crazy, just like your dance floor was. But you don’t want the picture of your dad crying in public for the first time ever to be sized down and hidden among a bunch of other pictures- give it it’s own page.
(*Anne: EXCELLENT advice! Annabel's album was BEAUTIFULLY laid out and provided just the right balance of things that went together, highlight moments, and space to appreciate the art and the memories all in the same space.)

• Put a pin in it for a few days – When you finish your album and preview it once or twice, don’t go to print and buy it right away. Let it sit there for a few days without looking at it. Then, go back and preview what you’ve made. Have other people look at it too. You’ll catch mistakes easier that way and maybe realize that two pages of people eating is not as adorable as you thought it was when you were making it.

(*Anne's final thoughts:
Most couples I survey after a few years of marriage never actually got around to making their own wedding albums. They tell me they hung a photo on the wall, or gave photos as gifts to family members, but their own wedding albums often don't get created, despite their best intentions. The sad part is... I'm equally guilty of thinking I can do my own album. I've spent 5 years helping other people make their wedding albums, yet even after being married for 7 years, I still haven't made time to do my own wedding album. We all start off with ambitious visions of having plenty of time and dedication to the project, but at this point, I'm ready to hire someone else to get it done for me just so I'll finally have the whole story of our wedding day in one beautifully bound place! Annabel's story is definitely exceptional- which is why I'm so glad she was willing to share her experiences on my blog!! Thank you Annabel- you're the bee's knees. ;-)

Keya & Robbie's Indian Filipino Hindu Catholic Wedding Album

You read that right - Keya & Robbie had an Indian / Filipino / Hindu / Catholic Wedding! Weddings are one of those rare events that bring people from diverse backgrounds together in harmony, and provides an opportunity to enjoy music, dance, and food together. Keya & Robbie decided to take all that they love from the traditions of their combined heritage and bring it together in a spectacular 3 Day, 5 Event wedding! The result was an amazing weekend full of love, life, culture, and more love! Their love for each other, their friends, and their family was simply intoxicating. I am so honored that I was able to witness and capture so much beauty. In the future, I'll break down some of the more specific events that happened, but to give you an overall vision of the day, here's a sample of some spreads from their 120 page wedding album:
























Special thanks to Delia Turner, who joined me to help photograph 3 of the wedding events.

Wedding Album Design Examples

I believe your wedding album design should reflect your sense of style just as much as every other choice you make for your wedding day. To help you identify which wedding album design is most appealing to you, I've taken one set of images and created a variety of album designs to show how each album design affects the viewing and interaction of the images on the page. While there are literally infinite design possibilities for wedding albums, I've found that most designs can fall into one of the following categories: Fine Art, Traditional, Editorial, Collage, or Embellished. I've included a quick preview here, but you can click on the links to view the complete album design sample.

FINE ART
This album design displays one image per page, like a gallery in a book, allowing each image to stand on its own and command the full attention of the viewer one image at a time. Images are usually centered on the page with a white or black background or matting, with or without contrasting border/bevel (the sample below is black background with contrasting white border/bevel.) If the book is printed with images on the front and back of each page (allowing two images to lay side by side when open) there are opportunities for pairings of images that uncover hidden or implied relationships. If you're a minimalist, or want your album to look like a portfolio of art, this is the album design for you:
Fine Art Album Design Sample


TRADITIONAL
This design is based on traditional matted album templates. Images are dropped into pre-cut or pre-designed openings, allowing for a collection of images to work together by appearing on the same page, rather than each image standing alone. A nice traditional design will typically average about two images per page, with some pages having one large image and other pages having a few smaller images. Other than the simple album, this album style has been around the longest, going well back into the film and pre-computer days. Images can have contrasting borders or can sit on a plain background of black or white. (This example sits on a plain black background with no borders/bevels.) If you're looking for a matted album (or matted album look) that will stand the test of time despite fads and trends, the traditional album may be one you want to consider.
Traditional Album Design Sample


EDITORIAL
This is a cross-over design that takes the clean simplicity of the traditional album but utilizes the benefits of full bleed printing and layout design software. Named editorial because it most closely resembles the kind of layouts you'll find in a lot of magazines and editorial photo spreads. This design makes use of collections of images sharing a full bleed spread of page and uses size to highlight more important images or to diminish less important images. Typically you can put more images into an album with this design than you can with the first two designs, while still maintaining the overall clean look. If you want your album to look like a magazine layout, this may be the album for you.
Editorial Album Design Sample


COLLAGE
The collage album design started to emerge in the late film days when darkrooms started overlaying images on the same print using advanced darkroom techniques. Since the invention of photoshop and other photo layering software, collage design has emerged on the wedding market as the most popular style of album design for approximately the last 10 years. This type of design offers the most flexibility and possibilities for how photos are laid out on a page, how collections are styled, and adds elements like overlapping images, translucent white or black filters on images, colored backgrounds, tilted cropping, and various bordering options. If you like a contemporary look with the ability to use images as your backgrounds, this album design will offer the most flexibility for you:
Collage Album Design Sample


EMBELLISHED
An embellished album creates graphic designs and embellishments around the images in an album, making the graphic elements of the album of equal importance to the images. Starting with a base similar to the collage style album, the embellished album adds flourishes of swirly stamps, textured overlays, fading vignettes, graphic backgrounds, and/or text with quotes, names, or phrases. Somewhat inspired by scrapbooking, this design style is creative and trendy for people who want to stylize their album with whatever is fashionable right now. It's often used to enhance albums that focus on portraits and details, and used less when the focus of the images are moments or scenes since it can become visual competition for the images on the page. If you love whimsical and trendy, this album will appeal to your aesthetic (note, the example below is not mine and does not use the same images as the others- eventually I'll change that, but I chose this example for efficiency):
Embellished Album Design Sample


While I'm able to offer all of the design options above, I personally love the Fine Art & Editorial album designs for their simplicity, timelessness, clean lines, and emphasis on the art, real moments, and people. I've learned to enjoy the collage style designs as well for my clients in order to offer added flexibility and more client customization in design. I think the embellished designs are really creative, but I also realize that in a decade those embellishments will start to look more like grandma's floral tweed couch and avocado colored sink, which were once the height of fashion. I have no problem honoring my clients requests for something different than what I prefer because ultimately it's the album that THEY are going to live with forever and pass on to their children and I believe it should reflect an aesthetic that they identify with. ;-) So, what album design style do YOU prefer?