Washington D.C. Album Cover Page with Map

I'm finally getting back into the groove a bit and have started working on a cover page for one of the next albums I'll work on. In July we took a vacation to Washington D.C., so I've been thinking about how I would do album cover pages for this trip. There will be 2 albums for this trip, so this is the cover page for one of them.

I've used maps quite a bit before in travel albums, but this time I wanted to try to highlight the map with a few of the places we visited. There was no way to do this for all of the places we went during that trip, so I'm planning to do more of an itinerary style layout for the second album, and keep this one more simple with just the map and some highlights.


I was able to find a map that I liked the look of online, and resized and printed it out at home. I then had to decide how many places I would highlight, and how to highlight them. I thought a small, thumbnail image of a few of the places would look nice, so picked a few of the main attractions and decided to highlight those. I chose, resized, and printed out 7 of my photos to use on the cover. I also created a header and footer banners (with grey cardstock and stickers) with just the words "WASHINGTON D.C." and our travel dates to finish it out.

Then it was time to put it all together. I chose a piece of 12x12 paper that had an interesting border around the edge, and I cut some darker grey cardtock to mount the map and the thumbnail photos on. I then took all of these pieces and placed them all on the background paper, and shuffled and moved things around until I liked the look of it. I also had some metal arrow brads that could be used to point to places on the map from each photo.

This layout came together really quickly and even though I switched around the thumbnail photos a bunch of times and thought I might have space to add a few more, I decided to keep it as it was and not clutter it up with more. Here is the final layout:

I'm quite happy with how it turned out, and the color scheme and clean lines are something I hope to carry on to the rest of the layouts in this album. Now I just need to to edit and order the photos from this trip so I can get started!