Wedding Album Design - An Informal Survey

[Rentham]

So I did a quick search, but most of the threads about wedding album design deal with what vendor to use. I'm interested to see how people are handling the actual process of design and how much creative control you share with the client.

If your client participates in the image selection and design process, how are you handling additional time and resource consumption? Are you charging it as billable hours? Are you estimating that and rolling it into the cost of the album? Or do you make the client meet you in person and turn the consultation into a sales call where you are pushing for upgrades, more pages, etc?

[Steve Mills]

Where the couple purchase a wedding photography package which includes an album, the images are chosen by the couple. I then design the album and put in a reasonable degree of creativity, as the couple have previously seen in my sample albums, usually when they booked me to shoot the wedding. I include a reasonable amount of album design time in with the package price, but if the couple want a design which I can't achieve, then I will refer them back to my sample albums and point out (very politely of course), that this is how I design albums. Things have never ended in a 'conflict' situation - both myself and the couple are trying to get to a great design and I'm willing to alter the design to suit the couples' wishes - it usually only leads to a handful of changes after my initial design and I just get on with the changes, because the bride is always right

My wedding package was pretty simple:

1. All-day shooting (yes, all day...4 hours or 14, I didn't care...has to do with my philosophy)
2. A set of high-res digital files (usually 300-500), touched up
3. Second-shooter
4. Wedding Album

This was always the same for every wedding...no negotiation. I included the album in the price because I wanted the couple to have something physical. The digitals is what they really want, but the album gives a more "real" feel to it.

In reality, the album costs about $50 (MyPublisher.com), and takes about 2-3 hours to complete. I usually have the album in mind as I shoot the day and edit photos, so it's easy to create in the end. When I'm done, I upload it to the couple and let them review the electronic copy (that option is available with the MyPublisher software). If there's no issues (never had one yet), then I order the book.

Example of my album:
http://www.mypublisher.com/?e=SV6kgz...%0A&showform=1

[dkorinchak]

We usually deal directly with the final client to get the design completed and approved. If the client wants to choose the photos... then great! That saves us a lot of work. Otherwise, we simply organize the photos and start the design process by choosing the best and keeping within the # of pages that client decides to pay for. We use Album Design Proofing to finalize our album designs.

Thanks!

Don
Flush mount abums and custom wedding albums for professional photographers

[Sweetlifephoto]

Our process has changed as the business has matured. We now select all of the images and do the design for our customers. We do allow them to change out some of the images after the fact, if they would like different ones. And they can eliminate pages if they want to pay less.

We talk about this approach with our customers from the very first consultation and help them understand that they are hiring us as their imaging pros. They understand that we do this all the time and as long as they can change out some of the images they begin to see this as part of our customer service.

We started doing this because our customers were taking forever to decide what images they want, either they got busy or they couldn't narrow it down or family politics reared its ugly head ("well if you have a picture of Uncle Johnny then you have to have one of Aunt Jane!"). Having us select the images allows us to tell the story of the day and we can make sure that it is visually appealing as well.

We charge $50 per page/side or $100 per spread.

We outsource the actual design and the final approvals are done online. Once the design has been approved we do final retouching on the images that will be in the album and send them to be printed. We have the printed pages sent to us to inspect and make sure there are no issues, either ours - such as a retouching issues; or theirs - a bad print issue. We then forward those to our bindery for completion.

[Rentham]

Great insight, thanks SLP.

[Sweetlifephoto]

Glad you found it useful!

[Parker32]

I offer clients two free revisions. After that, I charge $50 per page for any additional and $60 per page for any additional pages.