Layout Share: Summer Baseball

Baseball season is in full swing here in steamy Saint Paul, Minnesota. If you follow me on Twitter, you'll find a few days of the week are full of baseball-related Tweets, be them from Cole's games or from the games of our minor league team, the Saint Paul Saints.

Over the weekend, I made a very simple page with one of my favorite photos of Cole taken thus far in the season. I loved the warm light in the shot (and yes, that came from the actual sun, not a photo action.) So I added a simple edge burn vignette to the shot (using Rad Lab's EZ-Burn action) and designed this simple digital page using one of my layered templates and brushes from a new set, Typesets: Baseball 01.

Here's the digital page:

I could have called this good but I wanted to print it out and put it right into Cole's album. Now, one of the issues with printing full bleed/borderless pages is that your printer has to enlarge it just a bit to get the full edge-to-edge print effect. I'm not always a fan of how it alters the intended design ever so slightly. So I decided to reduce the size of the page by half an inch, and then mount it on a piece of black cardstock. In the end, it looked like this:

TECHNICAL NOTES: This page was designed using a layered digital template in Photoshop CS5. In order to reduce the size of the page, I went to Image > Image Size and changed the width of the template to 8 inches. Next, I sent the file to print with the Crop Marks option turned on.  I did choose "Borderless 8.5 x 11 Photo" as my print style, because I wanted the crop marks to show up on the page, and I figured that a little tiny bit of enlarging (as will happen with borderless printing) was okay.

 

I trimmed the print on three sides, placed it onto the black cardstock and then made the final trim on the bottom side in order to ensure equal amounts of black cardstock would show on all sides. I adhered the print and voila, finished page.

DESIGN NOTES: This design features on large photo with a group of small squares that can house photos or text. The small squares feature repetition of size. Also, note the repetition of color on the page. I used the Eye Dropper tool to sample the maroon and greens used on the page. Then I repeated those colors in the title art. The title and journaling are centered, with lots of nice open white space surrounding them on three sides. The narrow black edge of cardstock creates a grounded frame effect on the overall design.

And yes, if this design looks familiar, it should I used it to create a favorite page of Aidan about a year ago, using the same template.

Here's to recycling and re-interpreting templates!

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