PRT086 – And the Heavens Opened

And wow, Izzy, congratulations on your film and award!

Hee! :) If you already have a basic understanding, I bet a updated study on it will have a huge impact and might be easy for you to pick up! We’re running a special promotion through tomorrow. If you’re not on the email list you won’t have seen it, though. If you sign up now you’ll get the final email tomorrow. Or you can email me and I’ll get you the info!

Yep — having lots of open white space is not a “necessary” rule. I don’t tend to leave a lot of white space either, even though I like the look of it.

And yet…even for those of us who don’t leave tons of white space, it’s an applicable principle:

1) Pages need breathing spaces, even if those spaces small. I consider photos that have a shallow depth of field with blurred out backgrounds to have white space much of the time, and those backgrounds can be that breathing space. Been meaning to do an Paperclipping video on this topic for a long time.

2) It’s good to use small amounts of white space — margins and alleys — to define spaces and lead the eye in a hierarchical order through the page to the various photos. (I do already have a tutorial on this subject).

Another great show!  It’s only been about two years since I learned that principles even exist.  What a difference!  Now I can look back on older layouts and know exactly what it is about it that bothered me before.  I wish I’d known sooner. 

Very exciting to hear my comment about neutrals read on this episode.  Izzy said he probably botched my last name- yep!  (It’s French for “of the rose” and pronounced de-ROSE-e-a.  It sounds like Cartier, Garnier, or dossier.)  I just did a layout about that recently!  Growing up as a Jones, it was quite a surprise to marry into the name deRosier and suddenly have to deal with misspellings and mispronunciations.  :)

As a former design student, I LOVED this episode! I loved hearing your takes on “the rules.” 

My favorite “design rule” is white space… but I’m SO BAD at executing it, because I always want to put MORE on. And then BAM. My layout is overloaded and there’s no white space. My favorite trick to “combat” this is to design on a 8.5×11 page and placing it on a piece of “plain” 12×12 paper. I get to overload the 8.5×11 page, but still get the white space when I put it on the larger paper. Ali Edwards does this a lot too, I think. 

Another scrapbooking “design principle” that I SO admire when people can execute well is LAYERING. I cannot layer to save my life– any advice? 

Hello from London!  I often listen to PRT while pottering around the metropolis and every time I feel like I have a million shiny pennies to chuck into the discussion.  And then I epically fail to comment.  Sad face. 

But this week I’ve nailed it – yay!  I found this design principles discussion really interesting as I don’t scrap like this at all.  At least, not consciously.  And I don’t feel any need or wish to do so either, so it was totally enlightening to find out that some people scrap like this.  I go with a more intuitive thing, I suppose, figuring out my story, my pictures and my pretty things, cheerfully shuffling them about until I have that epiphany moment.  And I like doing it that way, it works for me.

I tried the triangley thing a couple of times, but it seemed to me that I’d invariably end up chucking one of the points of my triangle anyway.  So I packed it in, and now I go with that feeling that tells me if something doesn’t work, or if it’s fab.  (In my humble opinion anyway)

I thought the discussion about only scrapping what you need was interesting too.  My favourite thing on any page is my journalling as that’s what’s important to me.  And I write a lot.  I’ve been told that I have a tendency to be a fraction on the wordy side, and that I’m inclined to go on a bit at times.  I prefer to think of it as eloquence run amok :D

So, do I need all that journalling?  No.  Much of it is quite daft.  And being a possessor of that British stiff upper lip and lofty reserve, it’s not touchy feely journalling.  What I like about it is that it sounds like me; I can hear myself speaking in my voice through my words.  It might not be touching and poignant – in fact it’s disorganised and chatty and scatty and a bit stream-of-consciousness –  but I like to believe that anyone reading it will get a good idea of who I am and how I see the world through the way I tell things.  Plus, I’ve done it like this since I started keeping a diary in my teens.  So my journalling might be too long.  And I don’t technically need it all.  But I’m going to keep it all regardless,  The design principles can take a running jump and quake and cower before my lexicon of opinionated waffle.

However, I do have to do a little bit of forward planning to get on all the things that I like onto a page.  A couple of episodes ago, one of your guests mentioned that they didn’t think of journalling as a design element.  I couldn’t disagree more.  It can totally be a design element but you have to have it there from the start and think about where to incorporate it.  I’ve found lots of scrappers say they couldn’t fit any journalling on, or they don’t like the way it looks.  But you almost never get people saying that about photos because lots of us set out with a picture at the beginning of a page.

So I do a little planing and do my aforementioned cheerful shuffling with my pictures, the paper and my words written out on a bit of scratch paper so I know how much room they’ll need.  And I love scraplifting bits and bobs from other scrappers’ pages, and I stalk the internet for inspiration and blatant idea-theft.  

Having thought about it, I guess this is my own take on design principles.

Keep up the podcasts.  They’re terrific!

Kisses,
Kirsty xxx
http://journalofcuriousthings.blogspot.com/

P.S. It was brilliant to have scrappers from abroad.  You should totally get a UK scrapper, and people from all over in fact, and see if and how scrapping styles differ.

P.P.S. I volunteer :D

P.P.P.S. See? This comment is far too long.  But on the bright side, it makes up for all those times when I didn’t comment.

The key principle to layering is contrast. You also have to be willing to only show tiny bits of pretty things – for a lot of people that’s hard b/c it seems wasteful to hide so much. Gotta do it to make it look good though.
There’s a lot to say and show on layering and I’m not sure you can condense it to a comment. I have lots of tutorials on layering embellishments and it’s the topic of my True Scrap class this month.

Yep, that’s a definite design take!! :) I don’t remember that comment before on the journaling. That’s the topic of the next paperclipping tutorial: how to better work journaling into design, since it definitely is a major design element. You make an excellent point about the timing of when to include it.
BYW – I’m wordy too. ;)