Occasionally I get questions about designing coffee table books/albums for clients, so I thought I'd do a quick post to share my philosophy.  Seriously, it will be short because my approach is a simple one, and it goes a little something like this:  Keep it simple. There are lots of different approaches to book/album design, each of them with their own merits, and I am by no means saying that my approach is better than anyone else's.  It's simply that... my personal approach.  In the end it's simply a matter of preference, so feel free to read this post, call me crazy and move on. No hard feelings. While I've tried several different design philosophies, I finally settled on the idea of clean and simple with the focus on the images.  I've done album designs that included a fair amount of graphic embellishments and background colors, but I felt like those designs, while appealing, took a little too much attention away from the images and also tended to make the albums/books feel dated faster.  My intent is to deliver a design that will look just as relevant 10 or 20 years from now as it does today, and i think clean, crisp and uncluttered does that.  To that end, I've created a bunch of page template layouts in Photoshop that I can simply drop and resize images into, or, if needed, I can easily modify them on the fly and then drop/resize images into. And to finish up this post (and because if you're like me and learn through seeing instead of hearing/reading), here's a layout from a recent family session to demonstrate the approach I mentioned above. Here's the outside cover layout for (in this case) a coffee table book.

And here's an intro page that appears on the right when you first open the book.

And from here on out, you'll see two page spreads for a 10x10 size book (10x20 size when opened and showing a 2 page spread).

And finally a closing page with one of my favorite quotes.