5 Tips to Designing the Perfect Newborn Album
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How to Design a Newborn Album
‘They’re only little for so long.
That newborn smell won’t last forever.
Those tiny little toes and fingers will grow and develop.”
These are all things we tell perspective parents when they’re wondering why they should book a newborn session with us. But as photographers we have a responsibility as well. It is our responsibly that those moments, those tiny little toes and fingers, they stay alive forever. And the way we do that is by providing our parents with well designed newborn albums.
Today we are sharing our 5 Top Tips on How to Design a Newborn Album.
1. Keep it Simple
It is easy to get carried away with all the fun little creative word and image stamps that designer softwares offers these days. They’re obviously well designed to add tearjerking quotes to a design, but if we aren’t careful with how we use them they can take over the entire album and the focus on the baby is lost. By all means, feel free to use the quotes and stamps when you deem fit, but make sure that your gorgeous newborn portraits are still what’s in focus throughout the entire image. You don’t want to take away from all the hard work you spend on perfecting those newborn images either!
When creating each spread, focus on 1-3 images per spread. Don’t overcrowd a spread with too many pictures, but let each image shine on their own. The exception would be a spread with details, for example, a spread filled with macro shots of the nose, fingers, toes, ears, eyelashes etc.
2. Tell a Story
An album is created to tell a story. Not a story for our current selves, but for our future selves. For when that newborn is grown up and want to see what they looked like as babies. For the parents as they grow older and want to reminisce about the time their newborn was tiny and sleepy, and not a rambunctious teenager constantly getting into trouble.
There are multiple way to create a story, either as a timeline with the same order as the images were taken throughout your session. Or combining the images based on the color scheme that you used. Whichever way you want to tell your story, just make sure it make sense to the parents. That you aren’t jumping back and forth between different poses or colors. It makes it hard on the eye to understand what is happening.
3. Make it Easy
You don’t want to sell or produce something that’s time-consuming and hard on you right? You’ve already spent the many hours during the session to get those amazing newborn pictures. And then even more time editing them (we all know some babies skin can take forever to edit to where we want it to be. So what is the incentive for you to sell something that takes even more time out of your day?
An album design shouldn’t take you more than 10-15 minutes, if even that. Using a album designer program like Fundy Designer or Album Stomp can help you tremendously. With these programs you can have a gorgeous, easy flowing album design in mere minutes, ready to show your parents and send off to the lab for printing.
4. Timeless Designs
One mistake I see many photographers make is using the same covers for their albums across all genres of photography. But the covers you’d use for a Boudoir album, isn’t the same cover that would work for a Wedding album and definitely not the same cover that would work for Newborn albums. When picking out your designs for newborn albums, think timeless and soft. Newborns are innocent and sweet and you want the album to reflect that.
You can use both dark and light colors (my most popular colors are moss green, navy blue, dark gray and light pink), but use materials that are soft. Think linen, suede or microfiber. These tend to work better for newborn albums than dark leathers or snakeskin designs for example.
You can do both vertical, horizontal and square albums. I’ve noticed that most newborn photographers are drawn more towards the square albums versus vertical or horizontal. While there’s not a right or wrong answer to this, a square album works well for newborn pictures as they’re usually not reliant on keeping a full vertical or horizontal crop but can be cropped into squares to create a nice collage.
5. Name & Date
Parent’s love that they can put their baby’s name and birth date on the cover of the album. Especially if they have multiple kids. That way each kid can easily identify which album is theirs as they grow older.
Some parents also opt to add in the baby’s birth weight and height for some extra memories. As the baby grow up and come back for milestone pictures this is a neat thing to add to all the albums. That way as they go through the albums later, they tell a story of how much the baby has grown over the first year.
UAF Photo Lab offers high quality, hand made albums for any professional photographer. To be part of the UAF Family fill in your application form and order your first sample album at 50% off today.