I got quite a few responses to a blog post a few weeks ago about wedding albums and album design, so I figured I’d write up a virtual tour through several wedding albums and parent albums. In this edition of Inside the Album, I’m going to focus on the Zookbook, made by Zookbinders. It’s sort of a ‘standard’ album; it’s got a nice classy look to it, I love that I can make them square so the images have that widescreen aspect ratio, and there are a zillion really beautiful cover options to choose from. One of the best things about the Zookbook is that you can create miniatures of them and have them bound into a product called the PhotoBook, which makes fantastic parent albums.
Here’s Elitia and Joe’s super cool Zookbook.
Elitia had awesome taste and chose what Zookbinders refers to as a Napa leather cover — it’s basically a highly textured suede and it comes in a variety of colors. Her color, called Pear, really went well with the fall foliage that was in her pictures. The leather wraps all the way around the cover and is then hidden on the inside of the cover by page that’s kind of a thick black linen.Here’s a close-up of the texture of the Napa leathers.
One thing to note is that all Zookbooks have the option of having a cool cover cameo — that’s the image on the front of the cover. It’s a printed photograph that’s hand mounted onto the cover. All the cameos have black borders — you can check it out in this closeup.
Another thing to customize on the ZookBook is the gliding, which is the edging on the side of the pages. You can opt for black, silver and gold, among other colors. It’s amazing how high quality the ZookBooks are. Each page is maybe 5 mm or so — I’d say that one page in a ZookBook is the equivalent thickness of about 10 pages in a mypublisher.com or iPhoto book. Here’s another closeup; check out how thick the pages are.
Another cool thing is the lay-flat pages. On less expensive albums, you have a center gutter where the images disappear, but on the ZookBooks, you have nice lay-flat pages so you can spread huge panoramas across the pages. On the ZookBook there is an extremely small black center margin, but it’s almost not noticeable. Check it out:
Elitia and Joe also got a cool ZookBinders PhotoBook — more details on that one in a separate post.