One of the most popular gifts of this era is the personalized photo albums. These can be traditional or custom made, and they are always a hit. People love photographs, because they allow them to relive their memories. Unique photo albums make great gifts, but because they have been around for a while now, people have high expectations of them as well. Hopefully, the following tips will help you to create the perfect gift.
Get the Theme Right
First of all, you need to set a theme. This will make it a lot easier to make the album look relevant. Digital photo printers usually have a number of popular themes, such as Christmas, Sweet 16, Weddings, or Vacations, and all you need to do is add your pictures to them.
Make Sure You Know Who the Recipient Is
Whether you’re designing the album for yourself or for someone else, you need to make sure that it is relevant to the recipient. This is particularly true if the album is not for you. Be careful not to add to many images of yourself, or to add pictures of the recipient that they really don’t like. Remember that it is about them!
Pick Your Colors
To make sure your album looks great, you have to make sure that you use the right color combinations. Again, digital photo printers will help you with this, as they will have a number of preset pallets. You just need to make sure that it makes sense. For instance, if you are making a wedding album, and the theme color of the wedding was pink, then you should choose the pink pallet.
It is the colors you use that will truly make the album unique, and there are some combinations that work particularly well:
- Monochromatic color schemes use a range of different shades, tints, and tones of the same color. This is very harmonious and can look somewhat conservative. Perfect for older people or fancy weddings, for instance.
- Complimentary schemes uses combinations that oppose each other, like yellow and purple. When there is a strong clash, the result is very funky.
- Analogous color schemes which combine adjacent colors, like blue and blue-green, which creates a warmer look. Although it looks a bit conservative, it is actually a very modern fashion.
- Triadic color schemes in which three colors are used with the same distance on the color wheel. Blue, yellow, and red, for instance, is a popular triadic combination. This is very funky and quite young-looking.
The Design
Last but not least, you need to design the content of the album. This is where you get to add the pictures and create the true uniqueness of the album as a whole. Again, digital printers will have templates available for you, but you can adjust just about every element of this to make it look exactly the way you want it to. Curve the corners, rotate the pictures, add shadows, make certain images wider or longer. The sky really is the limit!