Digital Photo Book: Layout Design

We have a very full day planned tomorrow so I decided to post a few tips on layout design for the digital photo book a bit early. Since I picked out fonts, papers and designed the cover and intro page last time (can view here) I now focused on the first section of the book... which in my case is pregnancy. I decided to have a two page break between each section of my book. One page will be a full color patterned page like this:

This will tie in the blocks that I use on the cover and intro page and it will break up all the white space... adding some variety. Remember to keep unity and variety in mind when creating a professional looking book.

My second page that goes along with the patterned texture page with each section will be something like this:

This page will tell what happened in the section of photos to follow. (Note: the color and quality will look much better on the actual page printout.) I used the same fonts as before for unity. Now onto the fun part of photos. Don't worry I won't show you every single page of the book. I don't want to bore you, but these first few I'm going to show I want you to notice that when two pages are side by side that there are similarities on the layout design.

Its best to keep some sort of grid throughout your book. My text under or above the photos will remain at the same distance apart. And if you can imagine the two pages above being next to each other you will notice that the photos line up when looking across the pages. You don't need to keep them exactly the same but you should have something line up like either the top or the bottom of the photo for consistency. Here are two more pages that will go next to each other and it shows an arrangement idea of several photos put together.

I noticed I need to nudge the 3 photos on the left side over to the right a bit. I think it looks better when the white space is even between photos. I was glad hubby took these photos of us together so Kaelyn can see the pregnancy stage when she's older. Nothing fancy but they're great for the memory book.

Okay, next weeks agenda... break down photos that you want to use in the next section. I decided to do three months for each section. So I'll try and find favorite photos from Kaelyn's first month or two. Next week I'll share some super simple photo tips that you can do in Photoshop to make your images stand out. I'll show you an easy way of brightening up a photograph and also a quick easy way of making your own sepia colored photo... along with a few more of my new page designs.

I hope this is encouraging you to complete your own photo book!