We caught up with two of the design team,  Simon and Rachel, to talk all things album design. Here are their top four tips for creating beautiful, clean layouts. Less is more Rachel: Unclutter your design. It’s simple. Let the key images and high quality materials of an album speak for themselves. If you notice the design, it’s taking precedence over the images – good design is effortless. Simon: If the design is loaded with images the hero shots can be lost among a forest of images. By keeping the image selection minimal, you’ll free up space and make To View More >>

The presentation box our albums come in has a long history. Developed for us in 1995 by leading designer Donna Hoyle, it combines two graphic elements: a 17th Century Italian text, and a series of leaf and heraldic devices including our own Cherub. It doesn’t even bear our name, but to us, and our customers, it’s a key part of our identity, like Tiffany’s Blue Box… but maybe not as famous! The Box even survived a total rebranding in 2008, when we couldn’t bear to part with it. It was another seven years before we refreshed the design, and even To View More >>

Last week we shipped the very first real live order for our new medium-weight lay-flat Q Books. Not a prototype, not a concept drawing or trial album, but our very first, real live order. These lay-flats were just a part of our 2015 launch, our biggest in years, with new cover materials, new panoramic flushmounts and much more. We showed them first at WPPI and SWPP, but despite our own excitement and the enthusiastic response, we’ve resisted shipping the lay-flats until now. Why? To make them perfect they needed a little extra love, so we went back to the drawing board. The last To View More >>

A beautiful story behind a beautiful album. Thank you Andrew Donnan for sharing this story about your grandmother with us. "My grandmother raised me from birth. She put off marriage whilst raising me, so when I found out that she was getting married to Jerry, I politely yet firmly let her know that I had to photograph their ceremony. Ruth and Jerry wanted to keep the ceremony low key, so there were only five of us present. My wife (girlfriend at the time) was there with me, so bearing witness to their ceremony was all the more special.  Sadly Jerry passed away a few years ago, but To View More >>

THE DOLPHIN, THE GAZELLE, THE CHEETAH AND THE LION Originally published on The Candid Eye, what makes this post by James Yeats-Brown so compelling is that its passion comes from James' clients as much as from him. A lovely and revealing insight into the motivation behind family photography. - Ian When I arrived at Mike and Clare’s house, Mike was wielding a pen-knife in boy scout fashion and excitedly removing an old sepia photograph from a crumbling frame. The image depicted a formal group at a wedding, a family gathering posed in a static arrangement to allow To View More >>