Photo Book Design Tips: The “More is More” Layout

Although I’m a fan of clean, streamlined photo book layouts, and I love single photo full page bleeds (where one photo covers the entire spread), sometimes I get a little photo happy and I just go for it! Lots of photos in a single layout can have a lot of impact and the familiar mantra of “less is more” goes out the window.

Here’s some of my favorites!

The Photo Shoot

This catalog layout is reminiscent of a contact sheet from a fashion shoot. I like how it tells a story and ultimately that’s what a lot of us are trying to do with our photo books.

You too can be a “model” – here’s a variation of that from my own pregnancy photo book. I love my belly photos and even though I wasn’t consistently in the same pose, when they’re gathered all together like this, it makes for a fun visual record.

The Year in Review

A collage of photos is also effective if you want to give an overview of a particular time period. I did 12 of these layouts for each month of Photo Book Baby’s first year. I couldn’t pick just one photo – I had too many cute ones to choose from. You’ll see that to balance it out, on the opposite side of the spread is a single full bleed photo.

The Highlights

Also similar to the “Year in Review” concept is a highlights page. I often would do a collage of photos at the start of my vacation photo books, selecting my favorites. It was a sort of teaser of what was to come in the pages that followed.

I also love doing these types of layouts to highlight all the food we’ve eaten while on vacation. The food is such a huge part of experiencing another place or culture so you want to remember it. Please let me clarify folks – this collage below is over the course of a whole trip, not just a single meal! (By the way, my husband is supportive of my photo book obsession and knows to wait until I’ve photographed his food before taking a bite!)

The following is from one of my wedding photo books – it’s a collage of the table numbers I made for our reception. Each photo was from a trip we took together with a short blurb on the reverse with a favorite memory about that trip. Some of our guests liked our table numbers so much, they asked to take a few home!

The Legend

I once made a portfolio type book of all my favorite photos (mostly from trips I’d taken). Each page was a full-bleed single photo and I didn’t want to ruin the clean look by adding any captions. I came up with this idea to do a legend or sort of index at the very end to identify where and when each photo was taken. I love how it came out.

Parting Tip

The key to the “more is more” look is not to do it on every page in your book. It will look too cluttered and make everyone’s eyes glaze over. These types of layouts are best used more sparingly. Make sure to put a lot of full-page individual photos in your book as well to give your viewers a visual break!

Happy Photobooking!