Bridal books: The DIY revolution

(SYDNEY): When you think about the cost of wedding photographs, it’s not surprising that most bridal photo books remain under close guard and viewed rarely for fear of damaging precious memories.

But that needn’t be the way. Blurb, a creative book-publishing platform allows photobooks to be made for a fraction of the cost of traditional bridal photo albums, which can be shared and cherished with family and friends in a robust and professional book.

Blurb books are “coffee-table” quality and are an ideal way to capture and protect memories that can be personalized by the couple themselves.

And you needn’t have a creative bone in your body to produce a book.

Blurb has free book-publishing software, called Booksmart that can be downloaded and used to easily create a book. For Flickr users, Bookify can feed your pictures directly from your account into a book.

Booksmart is a more versatile option and comes with a number of Bridal book templates, but you can also design your own book from scratch, if that’s what you’d prefer.

There is also a collaboration tool that allows wedding guests to share photos with you, so that you can incorporate them in to your wedding book. It’s a wonderful way of easily pulling together guests’ photos.

While traditional bridal books are the most common use of Blurb by newly-weds, the possibilities of the platform have resulted in some really creative ideas.

Couples have used it to create personalized guest books, table gifts for guests about the “story of us”, thank-you books to everyone who attended, special bridal book editions for parents – the possibilities are endless.

Here are some of our top tips for creating great wedding books:

Mix black and white with colour – the contrasts can look striking.

Don’t forget the detail shots – the nameholders, maybe the bouquets - a lot of thought always goes into these details, you’ll appreciate capturing that attention to detail later down the track.

Sequence the shots from beginning to end so that it “reads” like a story of the day.

Be bold with special photos – if a photo stands out for you, give it a page of its own or a double spread. Alternatively, place a small single image on a page – it can draw extra attention to the photo.

Make the album for you – the great thing about the DIY abilities of Blurb is that you can make your perfect album – something a professional photographer could never do.

About Blurb

Blurb, is a creative publishing platform that enables anyone to design, publish, share and sell book store quality books. It’s easy. Just check out blurb.com and you’ll find all the tools you need, whether you’re a beginner or experienced creative professional. Make a softcover or hardcover book and choose from a wide range of book sizes and cover options. Order one book or many — volume discounts apply. Share your book or sell it in the Blurb bookstore. You set the price and keep 100% of the profits. Blurb also makes it simple to get the word out with free online promotion tools from badges to BookShow, our online book preview widget that lets friends and fans flip through a digital copy of your book on your website, blog, or Facebook page. Blurb is a company and a community that believes passionately in the power of books: making, reading, sharing, and selling them. We’re thrilled to help celebrate the diverse creativity and inspiration that our bookmakers represent.