Dunton Hot Springs Photo Album

For B Lee's birthday I am building her a photo album of the family trip to Dunton Hot Springs. This is also a huge thank you for letting me tag along. The photos are a collection of the family photo stream and Izzy's DSLR images. The majority of the photos are 4x4 matte prints from apple and look great. I also added a few panoramas that are printed 4 tall and 8-10 long. I need to trim some of photos to fit the page. The Album is build around 11.5x16 ivory photo paper and photo mounting tape was used to mount all the photos. 

LAYOUT

Layout was quickly done in Illustrator before I made any purchases, once everything looked good I made a little template to evenly space the images. Unfortunately I didn't have a printer, so I pulled the measurements from Illustrator and used a 11X17 sheet up paper that was lying around. The template took about 30mins to make, but it was vital. 

LASER CUTTING & ETCHING THE COVER

It took so long to get the laser cutter set up and get illustrator happy. I spent an hour realizing the laser was out of focus, then the colors were wrong in illustrator, then the line weights were locked, so it wouldn't export properly. Then I rushed and didn't align the leather and the pattern, so I blow a hole in the middle of a sheet of leather. FUCK that took forever!  I was at NRML for about 4 hour. But I'm pretty happy with out it turned out. I hope this gif loads

Assembly

Putting the album together went pretty quickly. I was able to keep the ivory paper clean and the images fingerprint free. However the spine did not fold as easily as i would have liked. I think my measurement of the hole placement was a bit off, so there was extra leather between the posts. This forced the leather to "tent" in the middle of the stem. After some experimentation with the layering of the cover/backing and some books to squish the tent, all was fine in the world.