A series about storytelling in album design. We turn the page in a wedding album… It's night time and we're at the reception. We turn another page… We're back outside the church in bright daylight! How confusing is that? Not only is the mood of the imagery completely different, the natural flow of the story is disrupted and any feeling of the 'journey' is lost. Chronology creates flow It may sound too basic to mention, but sticking to the order of the day helps make your images into a story. It also speeds up album design by predetermining the order you lay them out on the pages. Here's something else to think about if someone else is designing your albums: Having worked in Queensberry's album design department I realise how hard it can be when the images have been renamed so you can't tell the sequence, or if there is more than one shooter. The chronology is probably obvious to you, but sometimes it isn't to us! That doesn't mean you have to report the story devoid of artistic flair, like a boring news item. It's okay to re-arrange things a bit as part of creating a nice design, but respect the chronology. What to do In practical terms you should start the design process by laying all the images out in the album in the order that the events of the day unfolded. Designing one layout at a time makes it difficult to get a sense of the whole story - or even how many pages the album might have - so what the Queensberry design team do is roughly place ALL of the album images onto page layouts. Generally speaking the images in each layout (ie each page opening, as in the graphic) should relate to each other. We just drop the images on the layouts at this stage. We don't try to "design" the pages, just work out what goes where, so we know that we've included every image, and that the order is chronologically correct. We work on using approximately 6 images per layout on average. The whole process only takes about 5-10 minutes (someone else has already chosen the photographs to include, which is the hard part!). You can lay out the pages like this at the click of a button using Photojunction's Divide & Conquer function. Once that's done, we go back and make them look pretty :) Hope that helps! Next: Every great story has a beginning, a middle and an end. Anna