Hello! And welcome to our Digital Scrapbooking challenges here at SCS. I'm Nicole, your hostess, and I'm super excited to be here! It's my goal to bring you a challenge each week that will inspire you and help you get your favorite memories into your books. I try to keep things simple enough for anyone who's brand new to digi, but still have a challenge that's challenging enough to interest those of you who are veteran digi scrappers!
Here's week's challenge!
The Challenge: DGC060 - Playing with Text
Here is my layout:
"First Haircut"
- This week we will be focusing on building a special place for our journaling! That means that
you must have some journaling on your page this week. Now, some of you may groan at me because you do not enjoy journaling. But remember--without journaling, you aren't tell your stories! You're just embellishing a photo. So I want you to build your layout's design around your journaling more than your photos or your clusters of elements. Start with the journaling first and go from there!
- I would also like you to
pull a color from your layout for your text. You can do this with the Type tool or in the Character palette in Photoshop (just look for the colored box; double click it to open a box with an eyedropper tool!). I've used a cream color from my background paper for my journaling. But I was careful not to select a shade that was too dark or too light. I played with it until the color I selected looked legible and "right."
- Play around and
use more than one font type on your page. I chose a typewriter font and a handwriting font. Maybe try using one for your journaling, one for your title and one for a date!
Get Your Gold Stars:
- Take an element you like from the kit you're working with and use it in a new way! For example, I used a page boarder as a paper lacy frame for my journaling. Think outside the box! What new thing can you do with a little imagination?
- Play with a digital stamp! I used a stamp on my page here and left it black. I could have blended it into my paper (using the Overlay or Soft Light blending modes), but I wanted it to stand out. Play with a stamp on your page to add another layer of interest to your design.
Tips & Tricks:
- Consider the size of your text! When I was new to digital design, I created a hybrid (printable) freebie. A friend printed it out and shared her picture with me. I was excited to see my work in real life... until I was mortified to discover that I had not paid attention to proper proportions and my creations where HUGE. Right there and then, I when to my crafting area and grabbed my ruler! I took it to my computer and figured out that a Zoom of 33% roughly equals an inch in real life. Now when I'm designing, scrapping and journaling, I zoom to 33% percent to see if I've got all my proportions right.
Do the same for yourself and you'll never be caught off guard with text that is too tiny or too large.
- Have you ever played around with the leading or the kerning of your text? Chances are that at one time or another you've run into a font that was either spaced out too far or squished together too tightly (that's the kerning--called "tracking" in Photoshop). Or maybe as you typed your journaling and hit Return, you fond that your sentences were too close together or too far apart (that's your leading). Where do you make these changes? In Photoshop, you look at the Character menu (
Window > Character). In the first section, you'll see four icons and four places to enter values. Hover over each one to read what that affect it will have on your text. Play around and see what happens! You might find that a font you liked can take on new life when you can make adjustments to it.
- For more information about typography, check out this great article here:
Bright Lemon : Font Basics
- Don't even know where to begin with digi scrapping? Check out this lens on Squidoo for some tips on
Getting Started with Digital Scrapbooking.
The Fine Print:
Here is all your need to know info:
SBC's Information Thread
You can view all submissions for this challenge here:
DGC060 Gallery
To add your page to this gallery, just add
DGC060 to your keywords. Please also add
SBC11AUG in the keywords. This makes it easier for us to search and find your layouts.
Please remember to come back and post a link in this thread so we won�t miss seeing your work! And be sure to leave a little love for others when they leave love for you.
Happy scrapping!
DGC060 - Playing with Text - 08/02/11
