In recent years, digital photography and online photo sharing have become widely popular amongst users for a multitude of reasons, such as ease of use, flexibility in editing, and centralized access to one's photos. Conventionally, photo sharing has been enabled through websites or software applications that facilitate the upload and display of images and also allow individuals to control access to their photographs by other users. Other forms of software can also be found on the internet, which allows users to generate their own photo albums, usually to share photos on the web, using a home web server.
Even with the rising popularity of digital forms of photography, however, a large number of people still enjoy the look and feel of traditional printed photo albums and other forms of printed media, such as posters, calendars and the like. For example, a number of photo sharing websites now enable an individual to compose a photo album online from his or her own photos and to have it printed and shipped to the individual's location. These websites typically also allow a user to select a particular theme for their photo album, where the theme may include certain images or designs associated with it. Examples of such themes may include football, basketball, tennis (sports themes), as well as Christmas, Easter, birthday (holiday themes) and the like.
Traditionally, design templates for such themes of printed media have been created by a graphic designer to predefine the layout and appearance of the various design elements for a given market (e.g. sports logos, branding, theme park characters, sponsor logos, etc.) including such things as placement, priority and aesthetics (rotation, transparency, etc). However, such predetermined templates are often limited and restrictive in terms of customization, flexibility and variation. There exists significant space for potential improvement in this field with respect to more dynamic creation of new themes, simplified end-user modifications of existing themes and the automation of processes for general design of subject matter for printed media.