altfbox

Fundy: How would you characterize your designs?

Alt F: I keep all my designs very, very simple. If find that when you start adding too much, it becomes gimmicky and crowded. I actually design all of my pages as spreads, because that is how you see them. And I tell my clients as they are previewing the album that there is one image that is the main star of the spread. That image is going to be the highlight of that spread and all of the other images, if there are other images on that spread, are going to be supporting that main image. I just keep it very simple, I want a timeless album.

Fundy: It looks like we do something very similar where we have one main image, larger, on one page and support images on the other page.

Alt F: Well, it doesn’t have to be larger, just that one is THE main image. It can be smaller, like a small horizontal next to a larger vertical. As long as you see it. You know, you read left to right, so the most of the time that right page image is the main image. I also keep my album design flow as a composition. Just like you compose a picture, you have to compose a design.

Fundy: We also talked about pre-design. You pre-design all of your albums and show them to your clients BEFORE they see any of their images.

AltF: A long time ago when I worked for a company. It was a turnkey operation and we did a lot of weddings and we would do the album the same day. When I went out on my own, my goal was to do the same thing. But when I started falling behind, I started letting them pick out their own images and then, so I procrastinated and they procrastinated and…guess what? They did.

Pre-designing let’s me streamline my workflow and let’s me give a product that I am happier with. You know, I love my clients and they spend a lot of money on my artistic license. I have the experience in designing and that helps me.

Fundy: We pre-design our albums and we find that our clients are so much happier in the end. They don’t know how to design albums. And they don’t know how to choose images for an album, how to tell a story.

Alt F: Yeah, they don’t have the same mind-set about what will and what won’t work in an album. We put out albums that look better than any albums we did before we started pre-designing.

Fundy: What you were saying you do is: you bring the clients in, you over design (you design more pages than what they ordered), and let them decide which pages to include in the album.

AltF: Yes, all those decisions are made right with me, so I can guide them through the process. We have a little viewing room, right here. We have a screen that we can pull down. We can show them full screen, we can go through the whole design. That way I can tell them which ones I think make a good story and which ones I don’t think make a good story. As far as over designing, I pretty much tell my clients right at the consultation, “for this package or that package, you get so many pages. What I do is I over design. You are more than welcome to add more pages or another volume. What they can do, is go through and cut all but the very, very best pages.” If I just design 40 pages and that is all, they are going to pick apart each and every page. Not every one of my designs is a home run. If I put out 100 pieces and choose the top 40 I’ll have a very successful album. And they almost always end up adding more pages.

Fundy: How many photos do you average per page. We probably average 3 or 4 per spread (two pages)?

AltF: Actually, I think I figured it out once. It was 1.65. A little under 2 per spread. Sometimes when there are more images on a spread, like 4, then I am just in story telling mode, just trying to get the story out of the way, so I can move toward a design spread.

  • DWF U members can view the rest of this interview on DWFU. (login required)

We’d like to thank AltF for a fantastic interview and we are already lining up #2. He’ll be presenting a workshop with the Jason Group. You can join the workshop here. Additionally, his Combo Book Making DVD is available here. I’ve actually used it to make my own albums and it rocks. We’ve also heard he has a rocking couch for sale on Craigslist.


See you next week.

Fundy

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