What to do when you return home from a two week adventure with pages of journaling from your three kids? Incorporate those stories into your photo book!

When a friend of mine heard about my client’s epic family vacation to Australia and New Zealand last year, she kindly referred her to me to help sort through the piles of photos and craft the story of their vacation.

As soon as I heard about the daily journals kept by her girls (ages 13, 11 and 9 and required for a school independent study) I knew we had to build the design of the book around this unique memorabilia. Rather than adding location titles or typing up the details of each day, we let the girl’s original voices bring the memories to life in their individual fun ways.  The little drawings and spelling mistakes are as much a part of who they are now as the images we see of them.

By carefully selecting and editing the “best of” shots and utilizing plenty of white space in the design, we were able to add in the scanned handwritten journal pages and maintain a clean and simple look and feel throughout the book.

Speaking of those “best of” photos, I often get asked question related to the number of images to include in a book. In this case, the original photo set was 1,281 and we ended up with 250 in the album.  I guarantee you the story was all the more powerful for eliminating those 1,031 photos!

Because there were so many logistical and operational aspects involved in the planning of this trip, we included the detailed itinerary in the back of the book to serve as both a quick index to jog memories and a resource for anyone interested in a similar trip.

When my client presented the book to her husband this summer he couldn’t believe what she had accomplished a short six months after their return from the trip! The whole family loved seeing the handwritten stories connected to the images and will no doubt love looking back on these pages for years to come.