Wedding Blog

DIY Album Design

When I first started our album design, I had no idea what I was doing.

I know I mentioned that Mr. Ant and I worked on our high school yearbook together, but the truth is we hardly knew a thing about current layout and publishing methods. Our yearbook club cropped photos by hand and used a dinosaur-age layout software. (Public school pride, baby!)

So, like I said. Noooo idea what I was doing. Until…

My dear friend Google showed me this video tutorial on how to use Adobe Indesign to design wedding albums!

You can download the educational 40-minute tutorial here for only $35. It was very Indesign-specific and covered general album layout techniques, transparency, layers, borders, drop shadows, exporting, and more. As someone who was completely new to Indesign, I found the tutorial to be extremely helpful.

I have the entire Adobe Creative Suite 2, which includes Photoshop, Bridge, and Indesign. I learned that Indesign is one of the best desktop publishing programs out there. Once I got the hang of it (with help from the tutorial), I found it to be a powerful tool that allowed me to quickly put together any layout design I could envision.

Important Steps

• First and foremost, make sure you have the full rights to your wedding photos and the permission to use them for your album design!
• Make sure the digital images are of high resolution. (The quality of the original images I worked with ranged from 2544×1696 to 3872×2592. The resulting resolution of the albums is fantastic. I cannot comment on results from working with lower-resolution files.)
• Calibrate the colors on your monitor.
• Work within the proper color space (RGB, CMYK, or other). This will largely depend on the album company that will be printing your digital files.
• Determine the dimensions of your layout space. (My albums were 10×10, but opened up flat into 10×20 panoramas)
• Set invisible guidelines to mark generous margins along the edges and gutter (center seam).
• Be careful not to place any important details (especially faces) near the margins!
• Make a rough outline. (Ex. Sprds 1-5: getting ready, 6-10: ceremony, 10-15: portraits, 16-20: reception)
• Choose a group of photos that might work together in one spread.
• Create a layout using the photos. Repeat.
• Preview, edit, and finalize.
• Export your layout designs. (Follow guidelines recommended by your album company)
• Send your digital designs off for printing and binding!

Coming up… Eye for Design and Wedding Albums 101