A series about storytelling in album design. Highlight the Heroes Every story needs a hero, and so does your album design - probably one on most layouts! The hero image is the focal point, the main attraction, the place you want the viewer's eye drawn to. In graphic design speak it’s called creating visual hierarchy. The supporting characters help the story along and keep things interesting, but it's the heroes you want to shine. I talked about ways to begin and wrap up a story previously, but the middle of the story is where the action is. People dress up and assemble together, the guy finally To View More >>

For those of you who don't live in Godzone (New Zealand, OK?) Vaughan Smith does the drive time show on New Zealand's top music station, The Edge. He and Fletch have arguably the funniest radio show in the country and I listen to them every day. So when I saw his album working its way through production I thought I'd grab the opportunity to ask him a few girly questions. Read on, ladies, he's not just funny, he's got a soft centre. • Tell us about how it all began - where did you and Sharde meet, and how did you make her fall for you? Like any good modern day romance, it was in the workplace To View More >>

You’ve heard the saying about fitting square pegs in round holes? It can be very apt when it comes to choosing images for our Photo Front covers, especially the 1/4 Photo Front, as this screen shot from PJ Remix indicates – only a slice from the image will fit on the cover. Although I’ve used Photojunction to illustrate the problem, it solves the problem as well. In Photojunction simply drag the image you want to use on to the cover layout, as in the screen shot. If it won’t fit the space you’ll soon know: you'll need to choose a different cover style or find an image with a suitable To View More >>

[caption id="attachment_7050" align="alignleft" width="200" caption="Musée 10x7 dark tan; photography and page layout design by Johannes van Kan"][/caption] If you read my Musée story recently, you’ll recall it ended with a cliff-hanger … but it turned out well. You may remember we’d made an album featuring Christian [Oth's] images, but he'd never seen it. We were nervous. Well we finally did catch up, and he loved it. Then Johannes [van Kan’s] album of Virginia and Richard’s wedding won at WPPI. You can view his complete album on Youtube (no audio) or Vimeo (recommended: this is the To View More >>

                  How do you know what size and shape to make an album cover image? How do you account for the aspect ratio and cover wrap-around (the part of the image you can't see)? If it sounds hard, it's not. Just design the cover in PJ Remix. It's exactly like designing pages only easier. You can see the aspect ratio and the wrap-around. And problems rarely occur because it's so obvious when images don't fit. We've already blogged about album covers, especially here and here, so we won't repeat ourselves. If you're not sure how to send us the image there's a link about that too. To View More >>