Making a family yearbook is one of the more daunting book projects one can take on, so perhaps this explains why even I am a bit behind in this area of memory keeping. My desire to have a matching set of annual books lined up nicely on the shelf (you know, something lovely like this) caused a bit of analysis paralysis. I finally just made a decision and moved forward, reminding myself that anything I did was definitely better than these memories being tied up in my computer.

I designed this 2014 album with a two-page introductory layout for each month, followed by one page of highlight stories and a one page grid of miscellaneous images from the month. These two standard layouts were then followed by the images and stories from the rest of that month.

Because I wrote about most of the activities from the month on the monthly “happenings” page, many of the pages that followed often just had a simple title. Other times, a longer story found its way onto the pages.

As is always the case with the books I design, some stories required a grid of photos to be told, others warranted a full image on the page…

The “monthly happenings” design I created was quite labor intensive and probably not something I will repeat in the future. 2014 was the last year I used the Oh Life journaling system, before they went out of business :(. This daily journaling system provided me with a lot of great details, quotes and funny stories to accompany my images for the year. That was a lot of content to manage and edit. This will likely not be the case beyond that year, so that should help simplify my annual albums.

Although I plan to make some changes going forward, ultimately, I love how our 2014 stories were captured in this beautiful (8.25 x 11) album. Well, half of them at least, I maxed out the page count with the first half of our year so stayed tuned for part two…