Author: The Digital Press

Feature Friday | Juno Designs

Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of our Feature Friday series here on The Digital Press blog! I really look forward to doing these posts because I always enjoy getting a glimpse at some lesser-known facts about our multi-faceted and amazingly-talented designers!

This week we are focusing the spotlight on Jill of Juno Designs. This is actually Jill’s third feature article here on The Digital Press blog. If you want to learn even more about her… you can get a peek at her creative workspace HERE (from March 2017), and learn more about her background HERE (from September 2016).

In order to learn more about her this time around, we asked her to share 5 Things We Might Not Already Know About Her…

  1. I’m a total book nerd. I love collecting books and try to read at least one book a week.
  2. I’ve moved house 13 times. I like the feeling of starting over, but I don’t like how stressful the actual process of moving and renovating is. So I hope to stay put for a little while this time around.
  3. I love anything to do with True Crime: books, podcasts, documentaries, etc. It just fascinates me to learn more about what makes people do the unthinkable.
  4. I studied History and Psychology at university.
  5. I love yoga. I had surgery on my hip a few months ago, so I haven’t been able to do as much of it as I’d like lately. But I hope to get back to my regular practice soon.

 

As for her designs… Jill has unique, realistic, and paper-like design style, making her designs equally suitable for both digital and paper scrapbooking. Her kits use bright and bold color palettes, and often come with an abundant sprinkling of gold, glitter, and other sparkly items, which sets her style apart. You can find lots of themed kits in Jill’s collection; however, they are always super versatile and can be used for any type of page.

After having a look through her beautiful shop, here are just a few of my favorite products from her catalog of fun products…

Additionally, to give you an idea of how versatile her products are, I’ve included a sampling of the projects I found in TDP’s gallery that use her designs…

Aren’t those layouts and projects so fun and inspiring? 🙂

I hope you’ve enjoyed learning a little more about Juno Designs today! To celebrate her week as our Featured Designer at The Digital Press, Jill’s entire shop will be 30% OFF all week long (the sale will end at 11:59pm ET on Thursday 10/18).

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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.

Hybrid How-To | Chore Chart

Hello, everyone! Kate here to show you how I made our family chore chart. Every couple of years our chore chart gets a reboot because things change a little bit. This year, I’m adding our youngest (who is now old enough to help) and taking away chicken chores because my oldest has taken that over as part of her involvement with FFA.

Supplies

– Digital kit of your choice. I used Monthly Chronicles: Carefree.

– Photo-editing program, such as Photoshop or Photoshop Elements

– Scissors

– Lamination paper

– Glue dots

– Binder clips

– Tacks

– Cork Board

The first thing I did was type out every single chore in all the rooms of our house. I like to have one room per day deep-cleaned and the rest of the rooms tidied up. Obviously that will vary depending on preference. This is what works for us. I printed this list out so it would be easy to refer to and check off when working on the cards.

I have five kids so I made five cards per room. I started assigning chores to each card. Once I had all the cards built, I clipped in fun paper and printed everything out. My kids requested a “for hire” section where they can earn some money doing non-required chores. We also rotate the chore cards so no one gets the same chores all the time. I added a little element that I can switch between names on the chore chart to keep track of who gets the Number 1 card each day. And I also needed a tab to keep track of who’s helping me with dinner and clean up each night, because we also rotate that between kids who are 8 years and older.

I used lamination paper to laminate everything except the name cards so we can check things off or write things down.

I used tacks to secure the binder clips to the cork board. I attached magnets to the back of the two tabs I need for rotation. The name tags and “for hire” arrow are secured to the cork with glue dots.

And here’s my finished chore chart. I hope you’ll give this customized chore chart a try!

Kate About the Author  Kate is on the hybrid team here at The Digital Press. She lives on the Utah/Colorado border with her husband, 5 kids, 10 chickens, a dog named Gracie, and a cat named Kit. She’s a city-born girl who found she’s really a country girl at heart. She can be found outside, barefoot, and probably in her garden.

Tutorial Tuesday | Creating a Focal Point

Hello everyone, and welcome to yet another edition of our Tutorial Tuesday series here on The Digital Press blog! Today, I am going to share a few very simple tips for creating hierarchy on a layout in order to create a focal point.

The definition of “hierarchy” by the Oxford Dictionary is: “a system in which members of an organization or society (or photos on a scrapbooking layout) are ranked according to relative status or authority.”

I love using multi-photo layout designs in my memory-keeping, as they give a great overview of the context of the photos as well as up-close details of the event. But the question becomes… how to include so many photos without them all competing too much for attention? How to focus on the most important part of the story?

For example, let’s use the following group of photos as an example…

Step 1. Six same-sized photos will be “read” from the top left, across and then down to the second row… left to right… in our Western culture. But I want a way to cue the viewer as to which photo is more “important”…

Step 2. As you can see, I experimented with making the first photo smaller and the “after” photo of her hair much bigger. Just by changing the photo size I draw more attention to it (in a similar way, keeping one photo in color and converting the others to black and white would create the same sense of hierarchy). Then, to cement the large photo’s importance, I add the embellishments, layering them to be eye-catching and to add a pop of contrast in the glittery gold border and the light viewfinder, which also contrasts as a circle shape below the rectangles of the photos. I also add a large flower to visually anchor the photo, and add a subtle cue to the colour of her Dance dress, finally adding a pop of dimension and movement with the floaty string.

Step 3. I begin my second hierarchical cluster with the gold date tab. This is the final photo in the sequence, showing her delight at the finished view of her hair. I add some more gold wire elements to complete that visual triangle. A second smaller flower and layer some gold splatter under that cluster. The point of the heart faces into the photo.

Step 4. My third cluster at the top left is the entry point into the layout. I add the third circle element, the third pop of the pinky-purple in the wordstrip, and finally three spots of stitching. The third cluster is the least dense, made up of smaller elements… so while it serves as an entry point into the layout’s design, it does not steal any of the focus away from the focal photo.

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Step 5. This is when I usually save the layout, make a cup of tea, and then come back to re-evaluate it later. At this point, I decide to move the paper clip into the top cluster and add a curled ribbon up there. This is pretty and plays off the curls within her hairdo. I add the journaling at the top of the layout in a white hand-written font so that the eye will now be led from the top left, through the top row of the photos, down to the date tab and then from right to left across the bottom row of photos. This solidifies the circular movement into the foundation of the design. 

Step 6. I resize, sharpen and save it.

I hope that this post has given you some ideas and tips on how to create a focal point within a layout (especially one that uses a large number of photos). I hope you’ll give it a try and create this sort of flow within your next scrapbooking layout.

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About the author Stefanie is a member of The Digital Press creative team and a stay at home mother of three older children living in Cape Town, South Africa with her hubby of 30 years, two of their three children, and 3 Siamese cats. She loves photography, traveling, and digital scrapbooking — documenting the good and the ordinary everyday.

Tutorial Tuesday | Combining Multiple Photos

 

Hello everyone, and welcome to another edition of our Tutorial Tuesday series here on The Digital Press blog! Today I hope to inspire you to try out combining multiple photos to tell a more complete story with just a single picture.

I always struggle a lot when it comes to choosing the one perfect photo to scrap into a page. I’m the type of photographer who is always running around with a camera around my neck, constantly trying to catch up with the people I’m with because of the many photographs I’m shooting. I often run a bit ahead and then stand still with my camera ready to photograph my loved ones as they walk towards me or as they are passing by. For this tutorial I had a couple of pictures that I took during a walk through the woods. Since they are quite similar (taken from the same position) and I couldn’t decide which one I liked the best, I thought it would create a fun effect to combine these photos to create one single picture that would show a more complete story of our walk.

A great way to start is to open one of the pictures in a photo-editing program like Photoshop. I’m using Photoshop CC for this tutorial. Once a new file is created you can quickly create a better overview before adding the other photos by enlarging the canvas using the cropping tool. Then you can easily drag and drop the other photos in the same file. By changing the opacity of the photos to around 50 percent you’ll be able to position them on top of each other in a way that they almost blend perfectly. When it comes to positioning the photos, aligning the surroundings of the subjects is more important than the borders of the photos.

When you turn the opacity of the photos back to a 100 percent, you’ll might see that the borders of the different photos don’t align perfectly or are too harsh to look perfectly merged. We can improve this by erasing some of the edges and making it softer. It’s possible to do this with the eraser tool, but I always prefer using masks so the alterations aren’t permanently. You can add a vector mask to the selected layer by clicking on the mask icon in the layers window at the lower right of the screen.

When the vector mask is added to the selected layer a white rectangle appears next to the image of the layer. By clicking on this rectangle, the vector mask is selected and now editable. A brush can be selected to start removing some parts of the photo. Make sure the foreground color is set to black, since everything that’s white in the vector mask remains visible and every part that is made black becomes invisible. I always prefer using a brush that has some softness so the blending border looks more natural, but not too much softness that it’s starting to look blurry. I would recommend setting the hardness of the brush on a number somewhere between 50 and 90 percent, depending on the sharpness of the photo and the alignment of the other photos underneath. With the black foreground color selected you can now start removing the outer parts of the photos to make their transitions invisible. By changing the transparency of the photos you’re not editing, you have better sight on what you’re doing. As you can see in the picture underneath I never remove bits in a straight line. By making the border irregular or following some distinct lines in the photo like a tree trunk, the overlapping border will become almost completely invisible.

To make sure no stray pixels remain after erasing you can always apply a stroke in a distinct color on the layers to make the unwanted bits visible. When you’re happy with the gained result after erasing the borders and unnecessary overlapping parts of the different photos, you can determine how big the final picture is going to be. By using the cropping tool you can alter the canvas to the maximum complete width and height of the picture or make it a bit smaller if desired.

After the cropping is applied you’ll see the complete result of the combined picture you have created. To make the picture even more aesthetically pleasing you can now play around with levels, curves and saturation. Because I found that the pictures always turn out a bit darker when printed, I like to increase the curves layer a bit to lighten the picture and make it pop a bit more. You can easily do this by moving the point in the graph of the Curves Properties panel. By adding more points to this graph by simply clicking on it you are also able to increase or decrease the contrast of the picture.

Now the picture you have created is completely finished and ready to be scrapped into a beautiful layout! Because I liked the effect of the picture I combined so much I chose to use it as big as possible on my layout. For the layout I created with this picture I used several scrapbook kits from the July 2018 Special Edition section of The Digital Press website, which proved to be a perfect match. The finished layout I created can be seen underneath.

(credits: Into The Woods | Collection by Little Lamm & Co and Hooray, It’s Saturday! | Kit by Ninigoesdigi)

 

I hope I have inspired you to try out combining your own photos into one complete picture and I hope you’ll have a lot of fun with it!

 

 

Sharon-DewiAbout the Author  Sharon-Dewi is an industrial engineer with her own design company and a teacher at a technical university in the Netherlands who loves to spend every little bit of free time she gets capturing and documenting the special moments of her life and that of her loved ones by creating scrapbooks. She can often be seen running around with a camera in her hands and she is a big fan of anything Disney-related. One day she hopes to be able to permanently live at the happiest place on Earth!

 

Feature Friday | Karla Noél

Hi everyone, and welcome to another edition of our Feature Friday series here on The Digital Press blog! These posts are so much fun for me! Why? Well, I get to share a little “behind the scenes” info about who our designers are… and I learn a few new things, too.

This week, our featured designer is Karla Noél (formerly Karla Dudley). I’ve been a fan of Karla’s for some time, and we’ve been in the same digi circles for several years. And you know what? I thought I knew her pretty well, but when I asked Karla to share 5 Things We Might Not Already Know About Her… well, I had no clue about #2 on her list!

Here’s what she said:

  1. I’m engaged to my high school sweetheart ^_^ We are also expecting a baby, due next Spring! (yes, I would be the chick with the two sets of back-to-back twins already AND after I thought I couldn’t have anymore, I guess God had other plans lol! As far as all that goes, we’re both SUPER excited about it. Total parent mode already. We hardly wait to meet him or her and welcome them into this world 🙂 )
  2. I was a competitive All-Star cheerleader for most of my school days. I was asked to be in the movie “Bring it On” …but had to decline as I was heading off to college. My cheer coach at the time, Ray Jasper, was the choreographer for the movie and I could shout out the names of many cheer ‘extras’ in the film. I did end up going to college for cheer at the University of Louisville (KY). I was on the All-Girl squad and won two NCAA championships! Kachow!
  3. I have a knack for crochet. Okay, I actually love it! I go on binges and have discovered the fabulousness of making my own garments. My favorite items to crochet are cardigans and sweaters. Not only is crochet super useful during the cold months, but it’s inexpensive and it helps me de-stress and take my mind to other places while making something practical, cute, and amazing at the same time. Win-win yo!
  4. I JUST started learning my DSLR camera outside of the no-flash option. That’s right, since 2007 I have used only that single option in manual mode for all my pictures taking until recently. I’m now getting pretty proficient with the other modes, specifically AV, and loving it! I’m more in control, I’m really “understanding” my camera and a new-found love of photography has hit me. Coolness.
  5. My dream is to have my own brand of tangible and digital memory keeping products. Specifically, acrylic/rubber stamps, designer papers, lace papers and designs, mural art, decor, art items and more. Oh…and for Oprah to FINALLY interview me. I have a story to tell… if y’all are ready ^_^

As for Karla’s designs, if you love graphic-style papers and hand-written titles and wordart, then Karla just might be the designer for you! Here is just a small sampling of the amazing products you’ll find in Karla’s shop, so you can see what I mean…

And here are some fun examples of projects that were made with Karla’s products, to give you an idea of what’s possible when using her fun creations…

I hope you’ve enjoyed learning a little more about Karla Noél today! To celebrate her week as our Featured Designer at The Digital Press, Karla’s entire shop will be 30% OFF all week long (the sale will end at 11:59pm ET on Thursday 9/27).

Additionally, Karla has a special Free-with-Purchase offer for everyone this week! Don’t miss out on this opportunity to stock up on your favorite products from Karla Noél … and you can also snag this brand-new (just released today!) item from her shop — Framed Template — for FREE with any $10+ purchase in her shop! (again, the offer is valid through 11:59pm ET on Thursday 9/27).

About the Author Kat Hansen is a creative team member here at The Digital Press. A Director of Human Resources by day, she loves the opportunity to spend a few hours each evening being creative. Vacation memories feature pretty heavily in Kat’s scrapbooking pages, as well as her health and fitness journey. Kat has quite the sense of humor (she “blames” her father for this), which she incorporates into her journaling and memory-keeping.

Feature Friday | Rachel Etrog Designs

Hiya friends, and welcome to another edition of our Feature Friday series here on The Digital Press blog! I really enjoy doing these posts because I get a chance to get to know our designers outside of the digital design world, and it is always so fun to learn about the person behind the gorgeous designs that we sell at TDP!

This week, our featured designer is Rachel of Rachel Etrog Designs. Rachel lives in Israel, and this is her first feature here on the blog (she joined The Digital Press earlier this year as a one of our resident designers). We’re so excited to get to know her better this week!

In order to learn more about her, we asked her to share 5 Things We Might Not Already Know About Her…

  1. I have a degree in architecture and interior design, and I worked for about 10 years in the profession until I changed to graphic design, which is my greatest love.
  2. I served in the army for two years after I finished high school. Here in Israel, boys and girls are obligated to serve in the army after high school.
  3. I’ve been vegan for almost 3 years.
  4. I’m a spiritual therapist. I help and guide people to understand who they really are by meditating and emotional processes.
  5. I’m a huge Depeche Mode fan, I even have the signature of singer Dave Gahan, who signed on my hand as a tattoo!

Um, I think we might be related somehow… because I am totally listening to Depeche Mode while writing this!

If you have not had a chance yet to look through the Rachel Etrog Designs shop at TDP… you really should!  There are so many gorgeous kits to choose from!  I really love the bold beautiful colors she uses and the fun elements!  I just want it all!

Here are a few of my favorite products from Rachel’s shop (and let me tell you, it was really hard to choose!)…

Additionally, I also want to share with you some gorgeous sample project pages using Rachel’s fun products, which I found in the gallery at TDP…

Those projects are so much fun — and her products work so nicely for just about any type of memory keeper, don’t you agree?!

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I am so glad you joined me in learning about Rachel for her very first Feature Friday here at TDP, and I hope that you are just as excited about her gorgeous designs as I am! If so, I have good news… because during her upcoming Feature Week here at The Digital Press, Rachel’s entire shop will be marked down 30% OFF all week long (the sale will end at 11:59pm ET on Thurs 9/20). Don’t miss it!

And that’s not all! Rachel also has a special Free-with-Purchase offer for you this week, as well! Don’t miss out on this opportunity to stock up on your favorite products from Rachel’s shop at TDP, and you can also get this fantastic (and brand-new! just released today!) full kit — Storyteller — for FREE with any $10+ purchase in her shop (this week only, though… because again, this offer ends at 11:59pm ET on 9/20).

ErinErin is an artsy crafty kind of girl who is currently dabbling in far too many things, but is working hard to enjoy every moment of it, while avoiding the rain, which is difficult due to living in the land of many rains. She is slowly learning to use her smart phone to capture all the fun little bits of life that would otherwise go unremembered in the busy craziness that is raising a family!