Weddings, the birth of a little one, big anniversaries – life’s full of so many amazing events. When you want to celebrate something extra special, you’ll need your photo book to do it justice. This guide gives you simple tips on how you can create a bonusprint photo book to mark a huge milestone and even ways you can make your book a feature at the event itself.
Match your photo book’s design with the theme of your event
Continue the theme of your event in your photo book. For your wedding photo book, reflect the colour scheme of your big day in backgrounds and clip art. You could use your floral arrangements for inspiration or the colours of your bridesmaids’ dresses. For a baby book, use your baby shower or your little one’s nursery to help you pick a colour scheme for your photo book.
You also need to consider the style of your baby photos or the style of your wedding photography when you’re working out your design. And it’s just as important to think about the tone of your special event too when creating your photo book. For a traditional style wedding, for example, add a faux-leather cover to your album and use serif fonts for your page titles and captions. If your big day was a bit more laid back and more like a party, let that shine through with pops of colour and the design assets you use.
Quick tip: always be consistent with your design. Once you’ve chosen a style, stick to it throughout for a professional finish. You can find more tips from our designers in this guide.
Make your photo book interactive
Rather than just celebrating a special event with a photo book afterwards, you can make one a feature on the day as well. For your wedding reception, you can create a guestbook ahead of the big day. Fill it with photos of you and your soon-to-be other half and leave some pages blank. Then you can set it on a table in your reception so that guests can write words of advice for married life.
You could also create a birthday photo book for guests to fill in or make one for a baby shower and write messages for your little one to read as they get older.
Quick tip: because of the finish on our photo book pages, Sharpies or other similar marker pens work best. Biros won’t write on the pages very well, so just keep that in mind.
Create copies of your event photo book as a gift
This is a great idea for wedding photo books and baby books. You can gift your bridal party a photo book to say thanks for making your big day go without a hitch. And the grandparents would love a copy of your little one’s baby book.
Yearbooks also make a thoughtful gift too. When New Year’s Eve rolls around, create copies for all the friends who’ve made your year one to remember.
Quick tip: start your wedding photo book or yearbook with a short thank you message. And for a baby book, you could write a little note to the grandparents from your kid.
Add text to your event photo book
Adding headers and captions to your photo books helps to tell more of your story, so when you’ve created a layout of your photos, start to add text to go with your images.
For your wedding photo book, you could describe how you both felt at a specific moment in time. You can add important stats or milestones to a baby book, like the date and time they were born and their birth weight to go alongside their baby photos. If you’re creating a yearbook, you could fill it with all the new year’s resolutions you stuck to this year and write new ones for the year ahead.
Quick tip: if you’re stuck for something to say in your captions, you could use quotes or song lyrics instead. These would make a great addition to a wedding album because you could add your vows, snippets from the speeches, or lyrics from your first dance song.
Create an Instagram-style photo book
Replicating your Instagram feed in a photo book is a really simple way of creating a yearbook. By using your feed as a point of reference, you’ll be able to make sure you’ve got all your favourite photos ready to go, and they’ll be in chronological order too.
You can also create a wedding book with a little help from your guests. Before the big day, give them all a hashtag to use for the pics they post on Instagram. When you’re ready to create your photo book, just search Instagram for that tag and pick some of your favourites to lay out in a grid style.
Quick tip: Instagram can compress your image files, so if you’re using them directly from someone’s feed, it’s best not to enlarge them in your photo book. Enlarging smaller images can make the quality suffer, and you’ll see a warning notice in our editors if your photo is unlikely to print out well. To avoid this, create your grid of images on a smaller scale.
Whether you want to showcase your little one’s baby photos, milestone birthday photos, or the pictures from your wedding day, you’ll have loads of great ideas to start creating your bonusprint photo book.
If you need a few extra ideas to get going on your next project, check out our latest series of guides, which covers everything from design inspiration to tips on telling a story.
To save you some time on your special event photo book, why not customise one of our beautiful pre-designed photo books instead? You’ll find something for every occasion, from wedding photo books, to baby photo books, and yearbooks too.