Album Design Tips

A well told story is emotionally powerful, much stronger than the individual words. In the same way, a well designed wedding album becomes a wonderful story of your wedding day that is much more than the individual photographs.

The story told in your album becomes a very individual reflection of personalities when you are involved in the design process.  Some of the areas of album design are: selection (choosing the photographs), pacing (how much to show from each part of the wedding story), emphasis (which photos to make larger), and personality (how formal, how much accent on family, how journalistic, how much and what style of humor, etc.).

This service is included at no charge for couples that hire Eleakis Photography to be the photographer for their wedding. For other couples this service is available at the following rates: the first fifteen minutes are free (if you have a knack for design - go for it!), after that we charge $50 per hour.  Albums are also available for purchase.  Click this link to jump to our Album Price list on our home page.

We would like to encourage everyone who wants to tell a story in their albums to follow this process, it is worth it!  We are more than happy to help you with this, but if you give this a try on your own STICK TO THE STEPS, when you don't stick to the steps you will see too many choices and it can become confusing.

The Album Design Steps:

1. Make sure each photo is identified with a number that makes it easy to find the negative that matches the photo.
2. Work on a dining room or kitchen sized table with adequate lighting.  Work with the photos loose on the table, if you have oily fingers wear cotton gloves.
3. Separate your story into the smallest sections possible, things that go together, a section can be one photograph or a pile of  photographs, and it should not include anything that you would not mix together, i.e. no reception photos in the ceremony pile.
4. Work on one section at a time. 
5. Group the similar photos with-in the section you are working on together, compare similar photos, if they both accomplish the same mood pick one, if they together tell more of a story than each one does individually then you will leave them both in the possible pile for that section of the album.
6. If the section you are working on has -
   • a definite order of events, then lay the possible photos down in rows in the order of the event.  Group the photos by what you would like to see in each set of pages (the left and right side pages).  Decide on the sizes and arrangement to fill those pages.
   • no order of events, then group photos that tell "little stories", build pages from those stories, after you have pages built decide what order to put the pages in.
7. When you are done designing a section draw a picture of the page pattern on a sheet of paper,  write the photo numbers on your album map page, pick up the photos from that section and set it aside.  You will use a different map for each section.
8. Go back to step number 5 and design the next section.
9. When all of the sections are designed lay your sections on the table in piles so that you only see the top photo in each section.  Move the piles to decide what order the sections will look best in.  We do this because we find that the obvious order is not always the most meaningful.
10. Copy your separate section maps onto one complete album map if you like - you are done - order or print your photographs that need enlarging and enjoy your finished album story!