To celebrate our ten year wedding anniversary, we treated ourselves to a summer vacation on Martha’s Vineyard. However, I wanted to get another little something for Fatima. We have a big gallery wall and some photos around the house, but not many photo albums. I thought maybe I could design an anniversary photo album that captured the last ten years of our time together, our travels, and our kids. I went to my go-to printing service, mpix, to design a book.
Before designing the book, I thought about everything we did over the last decade. The book would be chronological starting from select photos from our wedding, and ending with our most recent summer family vacation (because I needed to order the book to be ready well ahead of our anniversary).
I never thought I would need to max out the 100 pages, but I did. And then I needed to be more selective.
Choosing photos for the anniversary photo album
Fatima has said she wishes she could hang more of my photographs from our travels. She started a tradition on our wall to hang a one photo from a trip we took. I used that as my mission statement when selecting photos. Aside from our wedding, all photos in the book would have had to be taken by me. I started with our wedding in 2014 and worked through present day. Although I was pulling more photos than I wanted for each section, being selective was still so difficult! I used photos that were not already hanging on our walls, and I chose photos from our trips that captured the overall vibe.
I exported all of my photos to a folder on my desktop and went to mpix. I uploaded the photos to a project folder and started laying them out. As I pulled in the photos I was organizing them together by event/moment/destination. I used two page spreads to separate the events and slowly formed my design template I wanted to use throughout the book.
I was about two years of events away from the end of the book when I RAN OUT OF SPACE! I wanted to drop all of the photos into the album and cull back for flow, but I needed to be even more selective. I went back and cleaned up the book. At this point, I was only using 2-4 pages for each moment. Finally, I completed the book. I went through again to adjust the placements until I was happy with the story I was trying to tell.
Picking a photo album that works for you
I ended up with a 10 x 10 soft cover photo album. I initially wanted the hard cover, however once I filled up all 100 pages, the price was way out of budget. As you’re designing the book, the price is right up at the top. When you add or remove a page, the price adjusts. So I played around with some settings. Changing the style and size of the book will adjust crops and some placements, so if you do this, go back and take a close look at your book. In the end, I landed on the soft cover. And I’m glad I did!
The soft cover book is gorgeous. One hundred pages is much more substantial in person. The photos are so vibrant and the book is a perfect example of the high quality mpix has delivered year after year since I first became a customer over a decade ago!
My aunt Jean has a ton of photo albums. She has albums for almost every year. My cousins and I love going through them whenever we visit. I would love to be at that level and print a photo album every year. mpix has so many great options, and I would totally print a series using their hand wrapped leather books. One day, I’ll get more organized…
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