Why do I design albums?
I admit, I am one of those people that I described above. I have tons of my daughter’s bat mitzvah pictures somewhere and she’s just graduated high school. I’ve always had the best of intentions, but you know how it is....and then my husband and I went on a trip of a lifetime to celebrate an anniversary. When we came home, I couldn’t stop pulling my phone out and looking at the stunning places we had discovered. I realized how ridiculous this was, especially since I’m a graphic designer. I should know better! Creating our travel album was a labor of love and I thoroughly enjoyed the process. And I realized how necessary it was to preserve those special moments and how those moments get away from us too quickly. I consider it a privilege to be able to design other people’s photobooks...I especially love the messages I receive after they first look at it; there’s always this sense of wonder and joy and a little bit of “why haven’t I done this sooner?” in their voices.
You might ask yourself, why do I even need an album? Well, you could theoretically, pull your phone out and scan through the thousands of pictures to find that one specific photo you want to show your Mom; the one of your daughter eating Cheerios with a spoon for the first time. But by the time you've found it, you've both probably lost interest. Swiping back and forth on the phone to find the photos you want to share with your loved ones isn't going to hold their interest for long. And seeing those photos on a tiny screen doesn't do them any justice. By having your photos curated and organized and collated into miniature collections of a continued storyline that is fun and exciting and heartwarming to look at is exactly why you need these albums. And they're tangible. Something you can hold and turn the pages and look through again and again. Kids, especially, absolutely love looking at themselves in photos of when they were younger and covered with soap suds in the bath, or on their dad's shoulders, or sleeping next to Mom. They love seeing how ridiculous they looked in those old fashioned jeans and that funny haircut. Those memories are priceless and putting them into print turns them into something of a treasure.
There are so many do-it-yourself photo album companies. So why should you hire me?
Yes, it’s true. There are many do-it-yourself companies that will take your photos and automatically plunk them into an existing template and then voila! It’s done! Not true. In fact, despite the sophisticated algorithms that these companies use, the one thing they are completely lacking in is the human factor and personal attention. Their system is designed to take your photographs and chronologically place them into a template that you choose. It does not take into consideration which photos are breathtakingly beautiful enough to deserve their own page and which photos are less important and need less attention. It will randomly choose photos and turn them black and white, so that stunning photo of the fruit market in Venice you took last summer will be in black and white. And maybe shrunk to a 2 x 2 square instead of getting the attention it deserves. You uploaded your baby’s first year photos and you have a really adorable collection of all your family members holding your precious baby. The program will stick some on one page, leaving one or two on the next page, next to pictures of her first time on the beach. Your photos are worth more than letting some robot decide which photos go where.
There’s a lot that goes into designing a Photobook.
We work closely with you to learn about some of the design elements that fit your style. We study your photos and group them according to different themes. We add design elements that carry that theme through. And by doing all that, we’ve let your photos tell the story that is your life. The photobook isn’t a jumble of boring photos anymore, but it becomes a piece of art, an aesthetically pleasing flow of photos that move from theme to theme until your story is told. And no computer, no matter how sophisticated, can do that for you.
Comments