Our London Vacation is done – Now a coffee table book

Book Cover – Buy the book on Blurb.com

I spent much of my weekend creating and designing a coffee table book to remember our trip to London, England this past Thanksgiving.

You see no one wants to sit at my computer going through all the photos of our trip. No one is that interested in me just taking all the photos and just projecting them and talking forever about our trip.

What people are interested in seeing is when I have taken the time to create a storyline and thought about what I want to communicate about our trip.

The exercise of creating a book will help you have something to help you remember your trip and also make it more intriguing for an audience to enjoy.

One of the page spreads

As I worked on laying out all the pages and trying to create some sense of order I had to include some text. I needed to include information that would help us remember what we saw to be sure I didn't lose pertinent information.

When you put two or more photos together you get what we call the X-Factor. This is when the message of the combined photos communicates something totally different than the photos just by themselves.  They strengthen each other.

Adding text goes even further and helps fill in all the information that is left out in a photograph.

Funny thing about great photos is they ask questions.  Yes the best photos have your audience asking questions.  Who is that person?  The photo was strong enough to make you want to know.

Where is this place? This is what a successful travel photo will do because your audience will want to go there if it is successful.

I can picture myself in many years sitting drinking some coffee and sitting by a fireplace as I hold the book and flip through the pages to help jog my memory on such a wonderful time I had with my wife and daughter.

Call me sentimental, but I realized this might be the last time we have to do anything as a family for a while. My daughter will go off to college next year and who knows how our schedules will be going forward. I know we will do things in the future, but will we get this kind of time together?

Page spread on the changing of the guards at Buckingham Palace

While you can find some bargains on books about England they are not our photos and our specific memories. The book I put together is our trip and includes all the places we went to and enjoyed as a family.

This may just be the most archival way for our family to preserve the photos and memories of our trip. CD/DVDs tend to fade over time and hard drives can fail, but the printed page tends to last much longer than all these other formats.

I encourage you to take the time to put all those photos that you took on your latest trip into a book. Marry the images with text and not only will this preserve the memories, but it allows you now to share this with family and friends.

We all have friends who want to know about our trip because they are planning their own trip. Now we have something that can help them see what we did and help them determine if they want to see what we saw or maybe add some new locations that we didn't go to for our trip.

I recommend using Blurb.com for your book project. These are beautiful books made by you. You can turn your ideas into professional-quality books, magazines, or ebooks for iPad and Kindle.