Albums Are Awesome.Designing and selling albums is a fantastic way to make awesome profits with your wedding or portrait photography business. They are priceless keepsakes for your clients that are treasured and shared for generations.The best part?With the right skills it’s quick and easy to make professional quality, creative designs that sell.

WOULDN’T IT BE AWESOME IF YOU COULD HAVE More profits from an easy-to-create custom product?More free time to spend away from the computer and with real people?Clients that fall in love with your albums, and absolutely, positively have to have one?The skills to create your own album templates for any size you’d like?Mega fun designing, and confidence in your skills?Of course that would be awesome!What Is Awesome Album Design Skills?Awesome Album Design Skills is a downloadable video tutorial that will give you both the theory behind great album design, and the skills to actually do it. Using the industry leading page layout program, Adobe InDesign CS5, you’ll confidently create exceptional designs with drag-and-drop ease.
WARNING: The information in this tutorial is highly concentrated. You can get through everything you absolutely need to know in only 4.5 hours. Buckle up.
Wanna See Just How Easy InDesign Is?
It’s mind-blowingly easy to design albums with InDesign. That’s not an exaggeration. Minds literally get blown.
Wanna see how simple it will be for you to create your stunning layouts? Check out this sample video from the tutorial.
Note: Things get progressively more awesome as the video goes on. Prepare yourself.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=WQ0mMJa0w6c
What You Get

Tutorial Videos 4hr 20 mins
Album Design Field Guide 63 page PDF
Essential InDesign Shortcuts
Cheatsheet (Mac &PC)

TUTORIAL VIDEOS

Getting you skilled, nearly as fast as a speeding bullet. You can get all of the videos in only an evening. The videos are broken up into quick little shots of knowledge, and most are between 3min - 9min long. That means you can choose a topic, and learn even during your coffee break. Need a refresher? It’s easy to get back to the information you need.

ALBUM DESIGN FIELD GUIDE

A PDF resource that takes your album design knowledge to the next level. Includes:

Album Anatomy
Document Anatomy
Image Placement Guidelines
InDesign Album Workspace
Album Workflow
Typography Terms
Shooting For The Album
Types of Albums
Choosing An Album Supplier
Pricing Your Albums
Selling Your Albums

ESSENTIAL INDESIGN SHORTCUTS CHEATSHEET

A beautifully designed one page document to give you quick access to all the shortcuts you’ll be using to design your albums at warp speed.

The Skills

This is what you’ll be taking home.

CONFIDENCE

Confidence comes from true understanding. And you’ll understand how to create albums that are strong and timeless. Bonus!: This tutorial is focused on the fundamental concepts of great design. What does that mean for you? This information will be valuable for any type of design project you do. Super duper!

SHOOT FOR THE ALBUM

A great album starts in camera. Get tips to improve the way you shoot to create more dynamic albums.

GET CREATIVE

The best album designs are created around the images, not the other way around. Learn to easily create custom designs that compliment your photos perfectly.

GRAPHIC DESIGN

If you’re designing albums, you need to have some graphic design skills in your belt. You’ll learn fundamental concepts, and how they apply directly to albums.

TYPOGRAPHY

Using text? You should know about typography! You’ll learn a few simple techniques to create better looking text that improves your design.

SAVE TIME

Use all the powerful tools in InDesign to make your album process super speedy, without sacrificing design quality.

CONSISTENCY

One of the most important factors in creating a professional design is consistency. Learn how to apply this principle quickly and easily.

SALES AND PRICING

Beautiful albums won’t help your business unless you have some guidance in how to price and sell them. Learn simple techniques to make albums a highly desired product in your lineup.

UNDERSTAND ALBUMS

There are a ton of specific terms used in album production. By understanding what they mean you’ll be able to create better designs with confidence.

PRINT PREPARATION

Getting your files ready for print takes work and knowledge, so you’ll learn how to get the best quality as efficiently as possible.

What You Learn

Super Photo Editing Skills covers a lot of information, helping you with all aspects of your photo editing. Here are the topics you’ll be learning. It’s really awesome stuff. Seriously.

ALL ABOUT ALBUMS

Album Anatomy
Choosing An Album Supplier That’s Right For You
Pricing Your Albums Profitably
How to Make Selling Albums Easy and Enjoyable

GETTING TO KNOW INDESIGN CS5

Setting up InDesign for Maximum Album Awesomeness
Setting up a Document for Great Design Potential
Creating the Perfect Album Design Workspace

USING INDESIGN CS5 TO CREATE AN ALBUM

Adding Your Pretty Photos
Creating Perfect Alignment
Using Your Library for Super Speed Designing
Panels That Help You Win
How Photoshop Joins the Game

GRAPHIC DESIGN

Why You Should Learn Graphic Design
Shooting for the Album
Overcoming Designer’s Block
Finding Inspiration Without Copying
How You View Design and Why You Need to Know
The 5 Principles of Graphic Design Applied to Albums

TYPOGRAPHY

Why You Should Learn Typography
Fancy Typography Words You Can Use to Impress Your Friends
Spacing, and Why It’s Crazy Important for Your Typography
Choosing a Typeface
The Two Types of Numerals and When to Use Them

PROOFING

Why You Should Be Pre-Designing
Using a PDF to Proof
Using JPEGS to Proof
Creating Album Galleries That Get Shown Off
Making Edits Easily

PREPPING FOR PRINTING

Why Preflight is Awesome
How Packages Save You Headaches
When to Do Your Retouching to Save Time
Colour Management That Isn’t Scary
Getting the Best Quality Files for the Best Quality Prints

9 Reasons Why You Should Use InDesign, and Not Photoshop, for Your Albums

There is an epidemic in the photography industry, and it’s called Photoshop Addiction . It was a program that was comfortable and familiar, so photographers tried to make it do everything under the sun, including album design. But, Photoshop was never ever meant for album design. Those brilliant folks at Adobe came out with a better program for layout, and called it InDesign. Go with the industry leading program, and be confident that you’re using the right tool for the job.

Heck, it’s in the titles. Photoshop is for PHOTO and InDesign is for DESIGN.

Do you PHOTO an album, or do you DESIGN it?

Here are 9 reasons why InDesign is the right program for album design:

Faster: Yep, it’s way faster for you to design an album in InDesign. You’ll be able to design 15 custom spreads in 20 minutes. Don’t believe me? There might be a video in the tutorial that shows me doing exactly that. Maybe. And that’s custom work. Using templates would be even faster. The bonus of working faster, other than more free time? It’s a breeze to create huge albums for great upsales!

Easier: It has all the tools built in to make layout easy. It’s literally drag-and-drop simple.

Flexible: You are limited only by your imagination, rather than the constraints of an album design program. Making changes is simple, so you can fearlessly experiment, and get really creative.

Create Your Own Templates in Seconds: It’s take only a moment to create a template that you can use over and over to speed up your design time. You can view all your templates in-program, so they’re always at your fingertips.

Itty Bitty Files: Small file sizes mean that your computer can work quickly, even with huge albums!

Keeps it Together: InDesign keeps all the pages of one album together in one file. This makes it super easy to stay organized, change the order of pages, and create excellent flow and pace in your album.

Non-destructive: InDesign doesn’t hurt your photos. You can make them bigger and smaller as many times as you’d like without degrading the file quality at all. It just works differently than Photoshop. You need that kind of flexibility to create great albums!

Workflow Friendly: InDesign helps you create a smart and efficient workflow so that you can easily pre-design albums, make edits in a snap, proof with one click PDFs, and prep the entire album for print at once.

Powerful alignment tools: InDesign has many tools to help you create fantastic alignment, which sounds boring until you know that alignment is one of the fundamentals of great design.

Straight up, InDesign will make you a BETTER designer, not just a faster one. It’s the right program for people who want to create seriously awesome albums.