Designing the perfect wedding album

My top tips on getting the absolute best out of your heirloom wedding album

The confetti’s been cleaned up, the cakes long gone, and you’re still buzzing every time you look back on your dream wedding. Soon, you’ll be receiving your photos from us. You’ll sit down on the couch, pop the cork on a good bottle of wine, and tell Siri (or Alexa, or your partner) to fire up a slide show while you settle in to relive all the amazing memories from your day.

In this digital age, it’s easy to think that wedding albums aren’t as popular as they once were. That’s not the case, though, and the mighty wedding album is still thriving! So, why is that? If you can put up 1000 photos on the TV and hit play on a slide show, why do you need an album? 

Indulge me in a ridiculous example

Your favourite band is Coldplay.

(I suspect half of the people reading this muttered, “I *$&%ing hate Coldplay”, but for the sake of this example, play along). 

Your favourite band is Coldplay. You celebrate their entire catalogue. You have several Coldplay t-shirts, which you rotate on a bi-weekly basis. When you brush your teeth in the morning, you have confetti cannons set up to explode in unison with Head Full Of Dreams, just “to start the day right”.

When you sit down each day to play Coldplay to anyone who will listen, do you start with their first album, and listen to their entire catalogue of music? What if you hate X&Y? Some people really hate X&Y! C’mon people.. Fix You!

You might do that everyone now and then, but for the most part, you pull up your “coldplay = best band ever” playlist on Spotify, light a candle, break out the bongos, and listen to your favourites in all their glory. 

That’s pretty much a wedding album, minus the bongos. An album is a curated, polished, absolute cream-of-the-crop best way to relive your favourite memories. You would be SHOCKED at how many incredible options the modern album offers. From hundreds of colour combinations, fabrics and leathers and, yes, even velvet, it is probably the one thing you will pass down to your kids from your wedding day. Consider your wedding album your first family heirloom - that’s really the best way to look at it.

We get asked a lot what the best way to get the most out of their design experience is.

we’ve put together our top tips for making the perfect album!

1. More is not always more.

It’s a very common mistake to try and include too many photos in too few pages in an album. We generally use an average of 4 images per spread, which equates to roughly 70 images in a 20-spread album. I promise you, 70 curated images, presented exquisitely will always tell your story better than 200 tiny photos in a grid. 

When we design your album, we have absolute freedom across pages to make photos as large or small as we’d like, which helps highlight key moments of the day. When we have too many photos to include, we lose that creative control, which is one of the key elements to making an engaging and cohesive story.

2. Include design elements from your wedding.

Your wedding had some beautiful invitations, place cards, signs, and more, as part of your decor. Consider incorporating them into your album design, especially the cover. Each cover we design is from scratch, so we can use any fonts or artwork that was present at your wedding! 

3. Trust your photographer (wink wink)

Yup.. you knew this one was coming! But in all seriousness, your photographer, whether it’s me or someone else, knows your wedding day story and photos better than anyone. They were present for the whole day with you, not to mention the months leading up to it. If anyone can tell the story of your day visually, it’s your photographer. A lot of couples entrust us to not only build the album, but also select the images for it. Not only will this give you the absolute best layout and story feel, it will also mean you don’t have the chore of picking your favourite 70 photos from 1000!

Couples who opt to pick their own photos also tend to pick their “favourite” photos, and not the photos that tell their story best. If you LOVED your portrait session photos, you’re more likely to select far too many photos that are almost the same, giving your album a very repetitive feel. With an objective eye, your photographer (‘sup) will be able to take your absolute best portraits, and highlight them in the best possible way. Remember, your album is the story of your day, not a portfolio of your best angle. 

4. Consider parent albums

Your album is a one-off design. It’s never been printed before, and it will never be printed again. We will design your album, from scratch, which can take days. The printing presses, the cover embossing machines, they’re all set up specifically to print your album. A good portion of the cost in an album is that design and set-up. As such, you can get duplicate albums (we call them parent albums) for a significant discount over the main album cost when ordering at the same time. 

If your parents are anything like mine, they would LOVE to receive a copy of their kid’s wedding day to show off to all their friends. Maybe they’ll even stop pulling out your primary school album and embarrassing you at Christmas. Maybe.

5. Be part of the process.

We love when a couple wants to be a part of the design process, and invite all our couples into the studio to help them select their cover fabric, colour, and options. Did you know that with all the different book sizes, colours, and materials, there are over 2 MILLION album options we offer? That is nuts. Getting your hands on the materials is a great experience and really helps a couple visualise their final product. Once we’ve put together the design in its entirety, you’ll receive a proof to approve or request any changes before we go to print!

Want to chat more about making an album or come into the studio to check out some sample albums and materials?

BOOK AN ALBUM CONSULT

page designs from a client album