Wedding Album Design August 2005
www.ArtificialRainbow.com Copyright 2005, Roman Zolin Page 1 of 16
Wedding Album Design
Part 1
I don't want to discuss the various types of albums and covers. I will focus on the actual work of creating the design
of the album and highlight some of the details that may improve the impact of the album.
Doing some research I’ve seen several applications and tools that provide various capabilities to design albums.
Such tools could provide large number of layouts of the photographs and various supporting features like borders
and digital effects. But after reading messages in forums and reviews, it seems that there is no a single solution
that would provide all the capabilities and be stable (or without bugs). There is one thing that concerns me most –
the creativity, it’s very hard (if at all possible) to facilitate the process and allow the photographer the creativity,
which could be done with Photoshop or similar tools. Probably I have to add that after looking at numerous albums
most of them seem similar and somewhat rigid or chopped. What do I mean by rigid and chopped? Well, if you take
a look most of the lines in such albums (layouts) almost always either verticals or horizontal. Sure, it happens
because of the borders of the photographs. But who makes us to follow the same pattern every time? If you’ve read
my article about graphical elements in photographs, you know that there is more to it than a couple of
perpendicular lines. And I like diagonals most of all, as I see it, the lines (especially diagonals) create the flow in
the album page, exactly the same as the lines create the flow in the photographs.
So our challenge is to create a photograph (album page) out of several regular photographs (regular not in sense of
aesthetics). Let’s refresh the basics of the photograph, how we “design” a photograph. Looking in to a pure
abstraction of the photograph, we can see the lines and spots of light and shadow. Lines usually created by the
border of light and shadow, but instead of a simple dot on the photograph, they are like a fences. And our eye tries
to jump over the fence. Such an action requires some effort, so if the fence is low (low contrast: difference
between the light and shadow is small), then the eye easily travels across the fence, or at least with a little notice.
On the other hand, when the contrast is high, the fence will be high as well, and it might require a lot of strength
for our eye to climb over. In such situations, to continue its travel the eye usually tries the least resistive way – it
goes along the fence looking for a break in the fence or where it will be easier to climb over. That’s how the eye
travels along the lines. Similar situation with spots of light or shadow, those more like hills and pits, which are
another obstacles for a traveling eye. I have to mention that the lines may not always be created by light and
shadow. When our eye recognizes a face it reaches for the eyes of the person (that’s when we so disappointed
when we don’t see they eyes or their expression is not what we expected). And even further, the mind recognizes
the direction the eyes look and gives the command to the eye travel over there and see what happens there.
That was the very basics of the light and shadow travel of our eye. Now, when we know how the eye travels, or
actually why our eye travels, we can try to create a maze out of those obstacles – fences, hills and pits (or pools). It
seems like we are trying to create an amusement park, where the customer is the viewer’s eye. And there are the
same basic principles – to keep the eye moving, sometimes let it have some rest, and always try to suggest some
way out of the dead end. Don’t forget your goal to keep the eye within your park.
I hope you got the idea about the means we can control the viewer’s eye. We don’t have to loose the control in the
album page with several photographs, it just becomes more complex to do so, but still possible. In order to steer
the eye, we use the same techniques, but on a higher level. Each photograph in the album page will have its own
direction or orientation. This orientation depends on the most prominent lines in the photograph. It happens when
most of the lines or one big line creates a sense of motion, which has a sense of direction. Or there is another more
common situation, a person in a photograph looks from the camera, and his/her eyes create the line that leads out
of the frame. There is the other side of the coin – the photograph is somewhat static (something happens in the
center and there is no sense of motion) or the person looks into the camera. Such photographs look like anchors;
it’s hard to decide where to look after such photograph. There is nothing wrong with these photographs, they could
be very compelling, but the eye tends to stay on the photograph and examine those little details that we may
overlook at the first glance. I think, such photographs should be like a rest stop on the eye’s way and be placed
closer to the center of the album.
Well, we came closer to the actual design of the album, so let’s start from the basic page template.
Creating an empty template
As you probably already know, I use Photoshop to do all the retouching, and today I am again going to use this very
powerful tool to design album pages.