Why It Works Wednesday

This is the start of an occasional series called “Why It Works.” This series will highlight and dissect an effective page design to see what makes it communicate well. There are many ways to communicate visually and many reasons to communicate visually. I love how digital scrapbooking lets us do that and hope this series helps you do it better.

I am pleased to announce that Judith Blanchard (the51mom) has joined my Creative Team. She has a great style that shows off her creativity. You can see her gallery at Digitals here.

Below is a great layout that she made using my recently released kit, Serenity.

I love seeing two-page layouts in the galleries. A large majority of my paper scrapped layouts (twelve years’ worth!) were double page spreads. I just liked the continuity and flow of it … and the LARGE canvas to fill up! It’s a little harder to do them in a program like Photoshop or elements because the canvas size doesn’t fit so easily into your screen’s real estate but they are definitely effective for telling a story. And you know that when you print and put into your albums, the left and right pages won’t “clash,” if you’re into details like that (I used to be!)

Here are some tips for making a 2-pager in Photoshop or Elements. Create your canvas twice as wide as normal. So for a 12x12 double page layout, your canvas will be 24x12 and for an 8½ x 11, it will 17x11. First thing, before you add anything to your layout, add some guides to help you get everything lined up on your page. Start with a guide you at the middle mark that divides the 2 pages. (12” or 8½”)

This is in the view –> new guide menu

You will get a blue line like this:

If you wish, you can also add guides at the top (horizontal 0”) and bottom (horizontal 12”) and the left (vertical 0”) and right edges (vertical 24”) to help you place things there.

Now make sure that view –> snap to –> guides is on. This means that when you drag a new paper in, you can move it up to the edges and it will “snap” into place where the guides are.

As a side hint, did you know that when you are doing a 12x12 page and want to bring in a paper to the exact center of your canvas that you can just hold down the shift key while dragging it in and it will automatically center? I love that.

After you have placed your papers, if the guides distract you, you can turn them on and off them with CTRL and ; pressed together

When it’s time to save the LO, here’s what I like to do. Keep the double-page original file as is and save it. Then use your crop tool to cut and save the left and the right side as individual jpgs for printing or posting in galleries. The crop tool will snap to the guides you laid down, making it really easy. After you crop the left side (and maybe resize for the gallery), just hit undo until you are back to the double page so you can crop the right side.

OK back to the layout.

Let’s talk about what makes this LO work. This may seem a bit obvious but one thing that works is everything “goes together.” This was an easy task because Judith was working with a single kit. That doesn’t mean that mixing and matching stuff doesn’t work. It just communicates differently. In this case, you can see at a glance that these 2 pages go together and that you should treat them as one continuous topic. Other visual hints that help with that:

• repetition of the background paper on the left with a strip on the right
• repetition of the flowers and swirls near the photos
• flow of the green ribbon across both pages

Still looking at the idea of flow across the page, there is a natural progression from left 2 right from the cluster of 2 photos past the title and over to the secondary photo on the right.

Other touches that I like about this page:

• The light frame around the pictures help them stand out and provide continuity.
• The journaling tells the story about why there are pictures ok SKUNKS in her scrapbook.
• Elements are repeated across the pages but not all at the same size or in the same direction (they are rotated)

I hope this dissection gives you some ideas for your own projects. If you enjoyed this post, be sure to subscribe to this blog’s feed or follow me on Twitter to find out when I have posted again.

If you like the kit used in today’s post, it is available at ScrapDish and Digitals. My kits are value-priced: very rarely over $4.99.

THANKS for reading and shopping with me!