Make a Page Monday—Hybrid Page

STORY OF THE PAGE: Cole’s band, Want Slash Need, played their first paid bar gig. If that ain’t scrapworthy, I’m hard pressed to know what is. Plus, it’s appropriate teenage scrapbook material, right? I blogged about it last week, but knew the story needed a home in Cole’s album.

Note: forgive my slightly crooked photo. I assure you it’s straight in real life.

DESIGN STUFF: This layout feels like one big chunk of information that all hangs together in a block. You see it, right? The title and date box fill the width at the top; the photos fill in the middle; the journaling rounds out the block at the bottom. In a sense, the balance is symmetrical with asymmetrical photo design. None of the photos truly mirror one another size-wise, and yet they all come together like a puzzle to fill in the space. We have common margin spaces from side to side and top to bottom, as well as common rivers of space between the elements themselves. We have repetition of font style and color, the little pops of red type create a visual triangle on the page. A page like this is a puzzle to me. Literally. I’ll start with a title or a photo, and then begin to fill everything in. As a final touch, I had some wooden stars and thought they added just the right amount of embellishment to the page.

TECHNICAL SHIT: I went old school on this page and sketched the whole thing out using Adobe InDesign. When my brain is freed up from worrying about product placement or how to work in a patterned paper, I create quickly and end up with something that I love, like this page. I placed the first photo, the top left image, then Option+ Click dragged a copy to the right, added a different photo and resized the box. I repeated that process until I had all the photos placed and I used my Grid to space each one out evenly. I use the Grid in Photoshop all the time, as well. In my opinion, it is the best designer’s assistant ever.

For me, working in InDesign is second nature because I’ve used it for all of my print design work over the years. I had to learn to use Photoshop in scrapbooking. Sometimes, just going the InDesign route is the easiest. The other thing that makes it the most boss program ever? When I want to print out the elements, I copy the photos to a new document and it has a built-in script that adds crop marks to all of the photos, so I can print and trim precisely. I’m all about precise trimming, people. I print the sheet of photos onto a letter-sized piece of photo paper. This allows me to have any size of photo I want.

Of course, I created a Photoshop version of this design, which is available here. It uses a different (free) font but offers the same design.

The other thing I’ve been doing a ton lately is printing my journaling and titles onto laser compatible card stock. Everything is so crisp and true to color. Of course, this doesn’t work unless you have a color laser printer. I’ve had this one for about three years now and it’s been a fantastic printer. I only started using it for scrapbooking once I discovered you could get laser-compatible cardstock.

BONUS TIP: The font I used on my layout is Helvetica Neue. Did you know it’s pronounced “noya”? I’ve known it for a while now, but I recently saw an Apple keynote where the developer made sure everyone in the room knew. I was corrected on my usage years ago by a dear friend who works at Adobe. I was telling him how much I loved using Helvetica new, and he had a good laugh and said, “Cath… it’s pronounced noya.”

Duly noted.

PAGE SUPPLIES:
Layered Template No. 139
Helvetica Neue and Times New Roman fonts
My Mind’s Eye Wood Veneer
laser compatible card stock

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YOU CAN LEARN THIS STUFF! Digi Basics with Cathy Zielske is a new e-course from CZ Classes. I wanted to offer a course that helps people learn just enough to be awesomely dangerous. I am of the belief that you do not need to be a Zen Master of Photoshop to use it for your memory keeping purposes. Plus, the stuff you learn in this class can be applied to your hybrid projects as well. To learn more about the class, click here.