Sunday Sampling: Prague Album

I hardly ever print out pictures anymore. I edit them, post them to my blog, Twitter, and Facebook accounts. I share them with my Mom over Skype. Most of the time I don’t think about the fact that I don’t print them, but when my computer was out of commission recently I realized that I had virtually no access to our pictures if I didn’t have internet access and even then I wouldn’t have access to all of them because I haven’t uploaded all of them to one central location (note to self: I need to do this) yet.

I was inspired recently by a project I read on the blog of one of my favorite digital designers, Liz, of Paislee Press. She completed a project that she refers to as Off to Press where she put together an album with 296 pages using templates that she created. I love her designs because they are very minimalist in nature and these templates looked like they would be perfect for my project because they are very simple and have the perfect amount of white space so I can add a few words here and there if I want, or I can leave them as is. Once I learned that Liz had two sets for sale (and if you buy them together there is a discount), I quickly snapped them up.

The templates are designed for use in Photoshop which is what many templates are designed for, however I prefer to design multipage albums using InDesign. I’m much more familiar with Photoshop, but when I designed our wedding album last fall, I learned the basics and discovered that it did some things much faster than Photoshop and that it was easier to work with multiple spreads (in fact I’m not even sure if it’s possible to do that in Photoshop, at least not that I have discovered).

I spent most of last night importing (I learned that this is called “placing”) the Photoshop psd files into InDesign. It would appear that the individual layers no longer work the same way once you get them into InDesign (although I did discover how to see the layers), so most of my time was spent creating frames to place the images into. My favorite part about using InDesign to work with Album layouts is that once you have the album spreads set up with frames the actual album creation process goes pretty fast. I can drag a photo from the folder I’ve stored it in to InDesign, drop it on the frame and fill the frame proportionally with just a few, quick key strokes.

It will be awhile before I’m finished, but here are a few of my initial layouts (any strange lines you might see are called “guides” – they won’t print, they just help me lines things up. And the empty boxes are just placeholders for potential text).