disclaimer re: layout design principles and scrapbooking
Learning layout design principles is in no way required for making scrapbook pages.
Memory keepers go about preserving photos, stories, and details in a variety of ways, and that act of preserving is what is important. A scrapbook page isn’t better because it was made with the knowledge of layout design principles.
why I like learning layout design principles
(and why you might like it, too)
easy access to the tools and raw materials
Technology has put images and typefaces in easy reach in greater numbers than ever before. Photos that you take, that your friends and family take, that strangers on Flickr take are on your hard drive, on your phone, and on your little area of the cloud. You can purchase or even make your own images with software like Photoshop or Illustrator.
What you used to communicate with a handwritten letter can now just as easily be conveyed with pictures and illustrations and a typeface. Do a little searching and you’ll find a typeface evoking a time, a mood, an activity, or even a brand to go with your communication.
easy distribution of visual designs and communications
It’s not just that it’s become easier to preserve and create images and text. It’s that the distribution of those creations has become easy and inexpensive.
In the past, you received a party invite in the mail and the date and time and place were handwritten in after prompts. Now you’ll get it printed on 8.5″ x 11″ colored paper and rendered in multiple fonts from the guy who sits next to you at work. Or you’ll get a digital version of that via email. Or you’ll receive it via a service like evite.
We, as a culture, are generating visual communications in the form of event posters and flyers and facebook pages and websites and etsy product packaging and signs in an unprecedented volume.
if you want to be seen and understood . . .
The way you combine and present images and text affects whether your visual message will be seen, how it will be understood, and even whether it will evoke any kind of response.
Learning design elements (the building blocks of design) and design principles (the rules for putting those blocks together) helps you create visual communications that will be looked at and understood.
Learning these elements and principles as you create scrapbook pages is a really fun way to learn a skill that everyone needs moving forward. Whatever work you are doing now or plan to do in the future can be done better when you understand how to combine image and text to create effective visual communications.
to learn layout design principles
Start with our free class at Get It Scrapped.
It’s 12 lessons over 12 days. And it really is free. Click here.
Read a book.
These are my favorites:
Non-Designer’s Design Book, The (3rd Edition)
Robin Williams Design Workshop, 2nd Edition
The Elements of Graphic Design (Second Edition)
Design Elements: A Graphic Style Manual
Follow design websites.
Start here and link me up to your favorites:
So what do you think? Are you combining images and text and distributing them? How do they look? A better question: are they looked at and are they understood?
