So, you want to offer professional albums to all your clients. You love the idea of selling tangible products and creating family heirlooms. Knowing that every couple needs a wedding album, you don’t want to leave your clients with the burden of creating their own. You’ve picked out beautiful products that you want to include in your packages, but there’s just one thing that’s holding you back. How to pull off designing an album that is really going to wow your customers? Getting started with wedding album design may take a little research to help you decide what will work best for your business.
Back about 20 years ago, the layout of a wedding album was pretty cut and dry. Printed images of various sizes were attached to pages. The page layouts were determined by the pattern of a mat with window openings of various sizes. This was called a matted album. A page might contain 1-8 x 10 or 2-5x7s or 4-3x5s. The arrangements were limited by standard print sizes.
Today’s modern album is made with digital images and the design process is much more creative. When designing a flush-mount wedding album, the entire spread is your canvas. Images can be unusual sizes, panoramics, tipped, faded, and layered. However, this freedom can be a bit overwhelming if you are new to designing albums.
Let’s look at some of the choices you have when it comes to designing an album.
Wedding Album Design Options
A Design Service
Let the experts take this off your plate! An Album Design Service saves time and keeps you from being chained to your desk for hours. Zookbinders offers a design service that allows albums to go right into production once the design is approved by you. We’re a great one-stop-shop for professional wedding albums!
Getting started with the wedding album design service at Zookbinders is easy. Photographers can submit album images to the design team with little or no instruction. Designers will organize images and group them together based on the day’s events. They’ll average 4.5 images per spread, keeping the layout clean and professional without overcrowding. The service also includes 4 complimentary spread revisions if any changes are needed.
Adobe Photoshop
Photographers who like doing their own design, or can’t give up control that easily, can create their own album design and submit finished spreads. Adobe Photoshop is a popular program used when creating a custom wedding album design. If you are comfortable with the software you can do a lot of really cool things with image opacity, layers, and gradients. You can also save your designs and replace images as smart objects to reuse your layouts.
When beginning a project you will want to be sure that the spreads are the appropriate size and color space. Use guidelines to show where the safety and trim areas are. You’ll want to review the Design Guide for all the specifications.
Photoshop has a lot of bells and whistles. If you’re a bit bewildered after reading the last two paragraphs, that’s okay. It’s really powerful software and there’s a lot to learn. If you are new to Photoshop, or if the only thing you were going to use it for was album design, you might be biting off more than you can chew.
Design Specific Software
There are a variety of programs out there that are specifically for album design and sales. When exploring these platforms be sure to look for options that are for professional photographers like Fundy, Album Stomp, or Smart Albums. These companies have the design specifications like color space and sizing for many professional album providers, including Zookbinders. This takes a lot of the complexity out of an album design.
These applications have either a one-time or monthly subscription price. You’ll find tutorials online but do expect to experience a learning curve when first starting out. If you’re unsure about the purchase, find out if there is a free 30-day trial. Keep in mind you may not be able to export a project unless you pay and commit to the partnership.
If the one thing holding you back from selling albums is creating the design, an album design service is a way to go. If you’ve been doing designs on your own and just dread the process, outsourcing this task may mean a happier you.
Starting at $40, album design from Zookbinders is an attractive solution with a very little learning curve. For help getting started with album design through Zookbinders, check out our YouTube channel.
