With a bonusprint photo book, you can experience those once-in-a-lifetime travel moments over and over again. We’ll show you how to display all your amazing travel photos, whether they’re from a six-month trek across South America or a short city break with the family, with easy-to-follow design tips from our creative team.
Match your design to your destination
When you’re deciding on the design or the overall theme of your travel photo book, think about what you’d associate with your destination.
Create your colour palette
For a bit of inspiration, flip through your holiday photos and see which colours come to mind. You might associate a strong red with London, for example, to reflect the iconic red buses and phone boxes. When you picture a summer holiday in Greece, the buildings and the colour of the sea could make you think of white and bright blue. You might connect lush greens and turquoise shades with your travels in Thailand.
Get creative with matching clip art
Consider clip art and design extras to represent your locations too. You could use landmarks for a city trip, summery designs for a beach holiday, or food clip art of your favourite local dishes. We’ve got a category of clip art dedicated to travel and holidays, so there’s a great selection to choose from.
When you’ve pinned down the route you want to take, and you’ve chosen the style of photo book to work with, head to our editors where you can start to add your holiday photos, experiment with layouts, and get creative with your captions.
Quick tip: customise one of our pre-designed travel photo books to save you some time. There are even city trip-themed books, based on Rome, Paris, Amsterdam, Barcelona, London, and New York. They’re packed with cute matching clip art of landmarks, tasty local treats, and symbols of the city, so all you need to do is pop in your favourite photos, add a couple of captions, and you’re done.
Map your journey in a photo book
Mementoes make a great addition to your photo books too, and maps are the ideal way to show where you’ve been. You can download a map or scan one you used on your travels, and then pinpoint all the locations you’ve visited on your journey.
Quick tip: getting a good quality scan is just as important as using a quality photo, so follow these simple scanning tips to get started.
Create your photo book like a travel journal
If you love keeping a diary when you’re on your travels, you can turn your photo book into a travel journal when you get back. Arrange your holiday photos chronologically and document the highlights from each day. This’ll be a really nice way of looking back on your adventures for years to come.
Quick tip: for the design, try and get the look and feel of a journal. Handwritten diaries often have a personal touch. To get this scrapbook style, you could use assets that look like sticky tape to frame your holiday photos.
Create chapters by theme
Try splitting your photo book into themes. You could group pictures of local dishes or landmarks, separate sections according to colour, or divide your book by city photography and nature photography.
Quick tip: if you’ve been exploring with friends, you could always dedicate a chapter to each of your travel buddies. Then you can create a copy of your photo book and gift it to them when you all get home to look back on your big adventure.
Round up your trip in numbers
Wordy captions aren’t for everyone – maybe you want your holiday photos to do most of the talking. To keep it text-light, summarise your trip away in stats at the end of your photo book instead.
You could work out how many miles from home you’ve travelled or the number of steps you’ve taken on a city break. If you’re really into your food, why not work out how many new dishes you’ve tried or count the portions of your favourite local snack.
When you’ve added those finishing touches, preview your photo book before you add it to your basket. And always remember to save as you go – you don’t want to lose any of your masterpiece. You can find more workflow tips in this guide.
Quick tip: it’s best to add captions and stats towards the end of the photo book-making process. Some pre-set layouts, like the ones from our pre-designed photo books, will suggest where to add text boxes to work well with your images. But if you’re creating your own layout, add the text after your photos – you want your captions to complement your travel photography.
Whether you’re creating a bonusprint photo book after a big adventure or a short holiday, make sure you organise all your travel photos before you get started and plan ahead, so you can focus on the fun creative bit.
For more top tips from our creative team, check out the rest of our guides for help on how to create a photo book for a special event to how to tell a story with your photo book.