Hey everyone! I hope you are enjoying the various shades of Autumn wherever you are. I certainly am waiting for the leaves to turn a rich autumnal colour and take some leaf jumping pics of the kids. 🙂

Today I am here to share some ideas about ways to use all of the lovely planner kits you can find in The Digital Press’s shop — but for traditional digital layouts. Not everyone has jumped aboard the planner craze this past year, but there are so many cute products. Why not use them in other ways? Today I am here to show you how.

I have always wondered about all these gorgeous planner stuff in the shop. Because I don’t do hybrid or paper scrapping, I have always sort of believed that these items are just not for me. But then curiosity got the cat (or rather, me!), and I looked into the idea of using these items on my digital layouts. At first glance, you may think there is not much one can do with planners except, yes, make a planner/record-keeping kind of page. But the many possibilities may just surprise you, yet!

My first attempt involved using planners and printables in my usual way — I treated these as I would any other digital element. I clipped them to shapes and used them as paper pieces in their own right. I found that I really liked the end result; they add to the look of the layout, which is about a snapshot of a fun day…

[see link here for credits]

In my second attempt, however, I used multiple planner pages and layered them to create a focal point of paper mats. Not only do I think that it enhances the interest of the page… but it also adds a depth that looks almost real! This one’s definitely a keeper for me…

 

[see link here for credits]

But planner kits contain more than just papers. What about those cute little stickers, tags and other embellishments? You could use them individually, of course, but here I wanted to showcase how to use them purely as design elements. So I have used them to form leading lines on the page… arranging them in a flower or any other interesting shape. The possibilities, again, are endless…

 

[see link here for credits]

And how could I not also create a traditional planner page?! As you can see, this is messy, colourful, and random… but that’s the beauty of it. To mimic my own physical daily planner/journal, I tried couple of things here. I have focused on the shadowing a bit more, again to give that realistic look. For example, when I was placing those planner pages as though they were attached to the journal, I used clipping masks to reveal the binder holes beneath selectively and then added a large shadow. I won’t lie — that took some time, but I like the end result!

 

[see link here for credits]

So there it is… my little venture into the world of planners, and using these great digital planner products for other purposes! As you can see, there are no rules here or right/wrong ways of using them; you can experiment and find a style that works for you. Hope this post has given you some ideas and more importantly piqued your curiosity! If you do try some of the above styles or come up with your own, please share with us in the gallery. I would love to see them!

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About the Author Shivani Sohal is a donner of many alter-egos. A finance professional by day in busy London, she morphs into a seemingly normal mum of two in the evenings and weekends. She is constantly found with her fingers in too many pies and juggling the metaphorical balls. That is living on the edge for her; aided by the two ankle biters and a darling hubby who define the warm and mushy for her. She is ferociously dedicated to memory keeping — almost immune to any nay-sayers (or equally-disruptive crying children or annoying house fires!); keeping her head down and forging ahead at all times.

 

I have to admit it – I am a font addict!

Until just recently, my fonts were a mess on my computer… and believe it or not, all 1600 were installed in the Windows font folder. This slowed down my machine when using text in any program. Oops! In the past, I had used “The Font Thing” to organize my fonts — but when it stopped operating with this newer computer, I was lost. Good news — I have found a fantastic little freeware program called NexusFont, which has proved to be a perfect replacement for me.

This program catalogs all of the fonts on your computer and then allows you to sort fonts into categories that you, yourself, can set up. For me, the best thing is that I can access any of my fonts… no matter where they are stored on my computer (and from any program, even though they are not actually installed). Fantastic!

To start out, you can download the NexusFont program HERE*.

*NOTE: this is a program that is only available for those who are using Windows as their operating system

 

Once you install the program, you will see under Library (left panel) that there is a folder called Installed. This folder contains all the fonts currently installed on your computer and located in the windows/font folder. Under this there will be a heading Collection but until you set up collections (ie categories for your fonts) this will be empty.

After organizing all my fonts, this is what my main screen looks like when I have one of my Collections (Typewriter fonts) highlighted.

 

So what do you do after you have installed the program?

1. First, add any font folders you have (of fonts not installed and located in your windows font folder) to the Library by right clicking on Library and selecting New Folder Group. I have created 2 folder groups – one for purchased fonts and one for free downloaded fonts. You can then right click on this new folder group and select Add Folder.  This will allow you to navigate to the relevant font storage folder on your computer so that you can add this to your Library.
2. Set up your Collections by right clicking on Collection and selecting New Collection. My collections include Serif, Sans Serif, Hand Printing, Hand Script, Typewriter, Wingdings, Grunge, Stencil or Stamp etc.
3. Type in a sentence into the display panel so that you can preview the fonts.
4. You can add fonts to Collections either using drag and drop to drag fonts from any folder in your Library to one or more of the collections or right clicking on a font and selecting the category (see following screenshot). And one of the best things is that you can put a font into more than one Collection! Note that if you have a large number of fonts as I did, this will take you a few days to complete.

 

 

Once everything is set up, it is much easier to search for types of fonts just by clicking on one of your Collections. It certainly saves time. On a recent page I was looking for a particular chalk font, so clicked on the CrayonChalk collection above and only had to search through 23 fonts rather than 1600. And best of all it so easy to compare fonts.

One of the other features of this program which I love are that it is easy to find duplicate fonts even though they may be named differently. Just go to Tools and select Find Duplicate Fonts. Easy! The program found over 50 in my folders which I then just deleted.

 

And a handy fact — remember earlier that I said that you do not have to install the fonts to be able to use them. All you have to do is open NexusFont before using the text tool in Photoshop and all fonts within the NexusFont Library will be available to you. This is so handy! You can install and uninstall fonts straight from the NexusFont program itself.

NexusFont would have to be one of the best programs for those of us who love fonts and who use Windows as our operating system. Why not download it and start rediscovering some of your lost fonts? 🙂

Postscript: In the latest Windows update, there were changes to font management and this slowed down the loading of fonts in NexusFont. The workaround, if this occurs for you, is to disable Windows Font Cache Service. I did this and NexusFont is now running as quickly as it was before the update.

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About the author  Carolyn lives with her partner, eldest daughter, and 3 rescue dogs on 5 acres of paradise in the hinterland of the Sunshine Coast, Australia. Her camera, along with an assortment of lenses, is never out of sight. When not taking photos, she loves cooking and gardening and, of course, scrapbooking.