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Q. When Did The Coffee Table Book Start Designing Albums?
The Coffee Table Book has been in the business of designing wedding albums since 2006, coming up on 20 years. One of, if not the first business in Australia to offer professional photo albums direct to the bride and groom.
Before The Coffee Table Book, couples could only access high-quality photo albums through professional wedding photographers.
The Coffee Table Book carved out a niche service designing wedding albums with the bride and groom in mind. It was the beginning of the digital photography era and the beginning of couples receiving their wedding photos as digital files, compared to receiving negatives and prints as in the past.
With couples receiving digital photos, it also gave them options when it came to the type of album they wanted to display their wedding photos without being locked into using their photographer.
If you are interested in reading more about the beginning of The Coffee Table Book, read Our Story here.
Q. What Has Changed In The Wedding Album World Over Recent Years?
With a rebrand and website refresh in early 2016, designing albums hasn’t changed much over the years, but the styles of albums have changed alot.

Say no to hiding albums away in the back of a cupboard.
The albums of today have gorgeous covers with endless personalisation options.
No longer do you need to print individual photos and stick the photos into sleeves.
Albums today have edge-to-edge printing for seamless page designs.
MODERN ALBUMS YOU WILL PROUDLY DISPLAY ON YOUR COFFEE TABLE LIKE AN ART BOOK.

Q: What attracted you to designing albums for brides & grooms?
It started when I was an amateur photographer. It was the beginning of the digital photography era and the idea we could put our photos straight on a computer to view them was a reality.
But the amount of digital photos I was quickly accumulating, meant they were getting a little lost in the thousands of photos on my computer. Printing the best of those photos was something I enjoyed early in my photography days.
Photo Books were becoming popular and as a hobbyist photographer, I loved the idea of printing my photos in a book format. You could say I fell into designing wedding albums.
I loved looking at printed photos because thats what I was familiar with growing up in the 80s. Even today Id still much rather look at printed photos.
Then it was a simple realisation, if I could design albums for one of the happiest days in a couples life and get paid for it, that would have to be the best job in the world. Weddings make great stories so its easy to fill lots of pages in a book.
Id always loved design, then add my love of photography … the rest is history as they say.
Q: How long have you been a wedding album designer?
I started The Coffee Table Book when I moved to Queensland in 2006. I started designing albums for professional photographers, before realising the real need was to provide photo albums directly to the couples who were receiving their wedding photos in digital format on CDs back in those days.
It was important to get those photos off the CD and into print – print is the best way to enjoy photographs – but its also important to have a backup of those images. It was early days in digital photography and CDs could corrupt and then the photos would be lost. Thankfully over the years we are more educated on backing up our photos, but only because we or someone we know has sadly lost important photos. If you want some tips on keeping your digital photos safe hit up our article on the subject.
Back then professional photographers were still wary of outsourcing their album design. Whereas couples have no way of sourcing quality albums, except through their photographer.
So a year or so after the wedding as time was approaching their first wedding anniversary, the relationship with their photographer had lapsed, so they started looking elsewhere to create an album. I became that link to tell the story of their wedding in a professional quality album.
Q: Do you find it challenging to work with images from a wedding that you didn’t photograph?
I actually enjoy seeing the photos for the first time and seeing the couple’s wedding day play out in front of my eyes.
When I started album design back in 2006/2007, and being a hobbyist photographer, I actually went to a few weddings with one of my photographer clients to get a better understanding of the flow of the wedding day and then would design the wedding albums and it was hugely beneficial.
It certainly gave me another perspective and lead me to my own journey of becoming a wedding photographer. I can appreciate both perspectives and I just love designing wedding albums whether I was part of the day as the photographer or not.
Q: Do you prefer to select the images for the design or for the couple to select the images?
I prefer to receive all the images and make the selections myself. It gives me free reign over the design and show the couple the best possible design. As well as providing a storytelling approach versus just photo after photo or a cluttered design.
Sometimes people can’t see the potential in an image because its not necessarily a great image, whether the colour is off, its at an angle or the image is too dark/light, but I can easily see if the image can be saved.
If a couple were to want to choose their favourites for the album, I cant totally work with that too.
Sometimes I feel couples believe because I wasn’t there on the day, that I don’t know who the important people are and I might miss including them in the album. But I was a wedding photographer for 12 years and photographed plenty of weddings to get a good feel and detect who the important people are. But thats what the revision process is for, so we can iron out all the important images and especially make sure all the important people are featured and ensure they make the cut for the final album design before going to print.
Q: How would you define your style as a wedding album designer?
Less is definitely more when it comes to designing album pages. Ive seen too many albums, not mine of course, where the pages are just too busy with lots of images and even too similar images on the same page.
My style is clean and simple while letting the ‘hero’ images take pride of place. Keeping images shot in the same location, in the same light on the one spread is important for an aesthetically-pleasing design.
Id usually keep the spread either all colour or all black & white, however, sometimes mixing colour and black & white is quite effective when used sparingly.
I spend a bit of time cropping images too to focus on the story or emotion in that one picture.
Q: Do you have a preferred album size or shape?
Hands down Square albums are my favourite. The square shape is contemporary and timeless at the same time. I like the 10×10 because of its compact size but if you feel its not quite big enough we also offer a 12×12 album. Also the smaller 8×8 is still a great size to carry around because we all want to show off our wedding photos right!
But when couples ask me if any size album works better, there really is no wrong or right answer – its a personal preference.
Some people prefer a horizontal album as the landscape photos fit nicely on the horizontal page. Especially if you have photographer that has a more documentary or reportage style of photography then the horizontal photo albums might be the best option for your wedding photos.
But I still think the landscape image looks beautiful filling the entire spread of a square album, just be mindful you will loose some of the top/bottom of the images, but just equally as nice is the landscape image filling one of the square sides and overflowing onto the other side.
More recently we are falling in love with the vertical album as it lends it self to portrait photos. If your photographer has a fashion or editorial style and approach to wedding photography, then its worth considering a vertical album.
Q: What’s the turnaround time for an album design?
We offer a fourteen day turnaround for the first design. Then depending on how quickly the client gets back to us with there changes can vary. From approval of the design, delivery is usually around 3-4 weeks. Our design process is outlined here.
Q: What are some of the hot trends appearing in the wedding album design community?
Definitely the hot trends are album cover options. We are seeing the move to fabric covers, something a little softer than leathers. However leather albums have always been popular for its durability.
Definitely more adventurous vibrant colours but neutrals especially our natural linens are always popular.
Personalising covers with embossing – over recent years embossing has moved away from just one line of text in limited fonts. Now we can offer custom embossing to include any font as well as illustrations.
The most recent trend for album covers is steering away from embossing the couples names, but using quotes like “from this day forward” and so on. I personally love the more creative and adventurous covers as a way to bring the unique style of a couples wedding to their album.
Q: Do you include ideas for the cover as part of your service?
Absolutely yes. As designers, we love getting to experiment with new ideas and using different colours for album covers than the classic black leather. Usually its experimenting with different fonts for the embossing and incorporating illustrations from the couple’s wedding stationery.
If you have been considering having your wedding photos printed in a beautiful keepsake album, then get in touch as we’d love to work on your album.