His birth was a big event, but he or she has no recollection of it. His turning 18 was also a big day for him as was his graduation day, and so was the first day in his office, but today is the biggest day in the life of your son. Make it special….

NOTE: For convenience’s sake, and to keep the article legible, I have used the pronoun “He, himself, and his” at place where I wanted to use “He or she, himself/herself, and his/her”. You can give this gift to your daughter as well on her marriage.

The first step idea

Marriage is your son or daughter’s first step in the new life where he will meet new people, new happiness, new opportunities, new thrill, new compromises, new challenges, etc. This is the best time to tell him about how to shoulder new responsibility, and to stay as cheerful and smiling as he has ever been. And to make him understand this, what could be a better way than telling him about the success he himself had at various junctures in life! Gift him an account of all the first steps he took in his life in the form of a beautifully constructed The First Step Journal.

The first step explained

To do the technical work required for this personalized gift, you will need a page designing software like Adobe Indesign, or Quark Express to design the pages of The First Step Journal, and you will need any image editing software like Adobe Photoshop or Gimp (open source) to do the photo retouching and enhancement work.

For the content of this super gift,  you will need a recollection of every first step that your son took: the day when your kid came to this world; the first day when he crawled; the day when he took his first step; the day when he first spoke; the day when he called you dad/mom; his first birthday; his first day at school; the day when he won a cup/medal in sports; the day when he became an adult; his first vacation with family; his first day in college; the day when he graduated; his first day in office etc.

Along with this, you will also need a collection of photographs of your son taken at different junctures of his life. You can include the picture you clicked on different occasions: when he was born; on his first birthday; when he took his first step; on his first family vacation; on his graduation day, etc. In short, I am asking you to collect the pictures of all the “first step” occasions of your son’s life. If you do not have pictures of every occasion then you can replace it with a picture clicked on a nearby date or in the same month or maybe in the same year.

Select the pictures and occasions you want to include in the first step journal, and begin working on it. Start with creating a layout for the journal pages because this will give you a tentative idea about the size of the image to use, and how many words will comfortably fit in the layout alongside the image. After finalizing the layout, begin with writing “the first step” pages. Use a language that mimic a combination of greetings-card style and motivational writing. This step should be followed by optimizing the image for the journal.

Put everything in the layout and recheck everything, and the journal is ready for printing, but before going for printing, let’s have a word about the quality of paper, quality of cover page and the binding. I will suggest you to use high-quality matt finished photo papers for the journal pages, and will also suggest you to get it laminated once the printing is done. For cover, you can use a velvety paper, or slightly thin, glossy card-board paper. Just write the words like “The First Step Journal – your journey so far…. On the Occasion, when you are about to Begin Your Life’s Most Important Journey. With Best Wishes from Your Mom and Dad.”

The work is complete, now search for a good quality printer and get the journal printed.  There are good quality web-based printers available that do remarkable job. I will recommend digital printing for the purpose.