New Hobby

One of my goals for this year was to start digital scrapbooking. I've always enjoyed scrapbooking, but I've seen some really awesome digital pages, so I wanted to give it a try. My other reasons were having more time now that I'm out of school and being able to put some of my knowledge of digital media that I learned in school to use, not to mention the fact that I already purchased the CS4 Adobe Suite student version (and I don't want to forget how to use it :)

I just started a few days ago and I am loving it! It is way easier and faster than regular scrapbooking, and there are so many cool papers, letters and embellishments that you can easily download. Everything I've used so far has been free. It is sweet! It's inexpensive and the possibilities for creativity are endless. No more buying stuff at the scrapbook store or choosing pictures to develop, and the best part is I can close my laptop whenever someone starts to climb on me (which is a lot).

This was my first layout which I did in Photoshop, though I'm not sure why I used that program. It turned out okay, but part way through I realized that Photoshop is best for editing photos and certain effects you can't do in other programs and not for doing layouts. The layers can be annoying and text is horrible, in comparison.


All the other layouts were done in InDesign and were much faster to put together. If anyone has a chance to use it, or even get a trial version, I strongly recommend this program. It is made for layouts. Text boxes are extremely easy to edit and each thing you place in the layout is it's own object that you can arrange to be in front of or behind other objects (so you don't have to worry about layers). Sizes of all objects are really easy to adjust in InDesign too. Most of the effects that you use also work in this program. If you need to, you can create a photoshop file (.psd) and then place it in your InDesign layout. Then if you edit the photoshop file it will automatically be updated in InDesign, because all the Adobe programs are linked like that. It's pretty cool.




Thanks to my friends that inspired me to start by posting some of their awesome digital pages! My only reservation about it is how it might affect my blog--because I kind of like the blog too. If I already blogged about something, it makes me not want to scrapbook about it and vice versa. Hmmm. But I really enjoy it and I figure everything I do is a form of family history so whether it's on the blog or in a scrapbook, it's something, right?