How to orient a wedding album

[William Petruzzo]

I've just finally begun offering wedding albums to clients. I've started with a few discount orders for clients who are also friends or friends of friends with the mutual understanding that I'm still ironing out the details of this part of my business.

Right now I'm working on some parent albums. They're 6x9" Miller's albums, which look great. But I'm having a little difficulty deciding how to orient them.

The parent albums include 20 prints and I have a mix of horizontal and vertical prints to use (selected by the parents). In the interest of keeping the parent albums affordable, I've made it clear that I'm not custom designing pages for each album. It's one picture per page. But, therein lies the problem. I don't want to shrink images and I don't want to severely crop images. I'd like them to see as much as they can as largely as they can. So, Is it bad etiquette for the client to have to turn the album sideway to see the images correctly? So far that seems like the best option I can come up with.

This solution really violates my sense of design. But if it's how the industry does things, I'll be okay with it. So, I'd love to get the community's input.

 

[Big Mike]

What I have done, is to put vertical images on the left side page and horizontal images on the right. This way, when they do have to rotate the book to view the image, they aren't looking over one image to see another.

On the other hand, it's not really a huge amount of work to add a bit of custom design so that you can keep all your images orientated the same way. There should even be some templates available that would make this rather easy for you.

 

[Missdaisy]

So, Is it bad etiquette for the client to have to turn the album sideway to see the images correctly? So far that seems like the best option I can come up with.

Oh yes, personally if I recieved an album that I had to turn to look at the pictures I would consider it a mistake. I would just think that whoever created the album did not rotate the picture properly during the creating process.

The only way this could possible work is if ALL the pictures were vertical AND you had a photo on the cover that was vertical as well so that upon opening the viewer would expect the pictures to be turned that way.

Just my opinion, hope it helps.

 

[c.cloudwalker]

I can't say for sure that all albums were like that but the commercial ones I used the pages were square. No orientation problem. And they worked with inserts so that customization of the pages was a matter of the time it took to select the photos.

They must have been around 14x14 or 15x15 since I used some 8x10s.

I don't think I would set up an album that needs to be turned every few pages. I know I wouldn't like that at all.

I believe Art Leather is the brand that I used:
ART LEATHER Albums - LG.