Wedding albums for professional photographers come in a variety of sizes, page thicknesses, and cover options. Zookbinders has four distinct album types, but do you know we also have three unique album design styles? If you’re looking for something Contemporary, Classic, or Simple for your wedding album design – we’ve got your style!
Of course, custom-made professional wedding albums are gorgeous, but just talking about beautiful wedding albums is putting the cart before the horse. Having a professional album design is really the key to delivering something more than just a photo book. A professional wedding album design arranges all the best images to tell a story while maintaining great composition and balance.
Getting Started with Wedding Album Design Service
If you’re a control freak and love spending time in front of your computer knocking out stylish album designs, congrats on that superpower. However, utilizing a professional wedding album design service may be a way for you to make more time in your day for things, like networking for new business, watching lighting tutorials, or hanging out with your family.
Zookbinder has been manufacturing high-quality wedding albums for professional photographers for almost 30 years. It makes sense for us to also offer a professional wedding album design service, to help elevate the pain point, for many of our clients, of having to do all the design work in-house.
Our guide on getting started using the design service at Zookbinders
- Prior to creating a great wedding album design, you’ll need to know how many images you want your design to use. This helps to calculate the number of spreads. At Zookbinders, we suggest an average of 4.5 images per spread. This means some spreads could have 6 images and some spreads could just have one gorgeous panoramic image.
- Be sure all the images that are going into the wedding album design are edited and retouched for print. Zookbinders does NOT do color correction, so be sure your monitor is calibrated correctly. We welcome you to do a few test prints before your first order. To do so, please contact customer service and we’d be happy to help you.
- Choose your album type and cover. The design team needs to know this to create the perfect wedding album design. Also, if there are special “hero” images that you’d like to feature as a full spread or cover image, make a note to our design team. This can be done when you place your design order in “order notes”. The ordering system will let you choose a cover image and make requests to the designer.
What’s Your Style?
Let’s break down the details of Zookbinder’s three professional wedding album design styles. Next, we’ll touch on further wedding album design customization before anyone goes down the, “I can’t imagine someone doing my creative work for me,” road. Let it Go, we’ve got your style!
Contempo Design
The Contempo Design is a modern twist on a traditional wedding album design. Rather than having images side-by-side, they are put into layers within the spread. The Contempo Design has a dynamic and dimensional look.
In this design style, your design may use a detailed image, such as flowers, a room or setting, rings, or an invitation as a background image. This background image peeks through other images that lay over the top of it. It may be at a lower opacity as well.
In order to avoid being too distracting, not all spreads have images as backgrounds. Sometimes the designer will select a color or pattern from the submitted images to fill in a soft pattern behind stronger images.
The Contempo Design is unique and not something that a couple can’t do on their own. The difficulty of working with layered images and opacities is something beyond most consumers’ experience level. This makes the Contempo Design very one-of-a-kind.
Classic Design
Taking some cues from photo matting and color blocking, the Classic Design highlights images with frames, stroke lines, and colorful complimentary accents. These designs can be vibrant or subtle, depending on the total range in the color palette of the images.
The Classic Design sits images side-by-side and each image is framed to stand out on its own. The colors in the design can reflect the bridal party’s wardrobe, floral arrangements, or in the case of a bar or bat mitzvah, the branded colors of the party decor.
The Classics Designs can be fun and creative. This design delivers a unique style, setting it apart from the template look of a drag-and-drop program.
Simple Design
The name of this design style says it all. There are no distractions or special design elements. Just a simple, beautiful layout. In a Simple Design, images are surrounded by white or black borders or they can extend to the very edge of the page. The design team keeps the trim and safety margin in mind at all times to be sure significant details are cut off.
Simple Design looks clean and timeless. It’s perfect for a flush-mount professional wedding album and really utilizes the impact that can be created using digital designs.
You Do You
“But I want something specific,” is the call of those who can’t give up the overwhelm of album design. Fear not. When submitting an album design there are two ways to share your instructions.
- There is an information box that asks you to list specific design preferences for all your albums.
- We also have a second box where you can list preferences for this specified design order.
If you’d like even more sharing we can create a design profile or tag favorite designs as a reference for the design team. We’ve got your style!
Learning about some of the advantages, variety, and flexibility available with a design service like Zookbinders can make you think twice about spending hours overanalyzing image placement. Design services don’t have to produce cookie-cutter results. Want to find out more? Schedule an appointment to talk with an expert HERE, because if you are interested in wedding album design – we’ve got your style.
