Creative Memories Digital 411 Blog

Let the Heritage Cropping.... Begin!

As you likely are aware, our good friend and heritage cropper Mike Pleice has been providing tips & ideas over the past six weeks to prepare scrappers for the Heritage Virtual Crop that kicked off this morning over on the Creative Memories Go Digital Fan Page. Even if you haven't gotten started, don't worry. Mike's blog posts are archived on the Creative Memories Digital 411 Blog, so you can get started on your heritage album project today!

Because I've spent so much time hanging around Creative Memories digital artwork collections (yay!), I immediately thought of several selections of 12x12 predesigned pages that would fit right in with the heritage theme, so I thought I'd share them here. Hopefully this will make it a bit easier to choose artwork for your project:

Reminisce Heritage Predesigned Pages (US|Canada):

Reminisce Predesigned Pages (US|Canada):

The Simply Said Ashby Baby Predesigned Pages (US|Canada) has lots of pretty designed pages that would fit perfectly for heritage baby photos:

Really, you could start with just about any of our beautiful Predesigned Pages (US|Canada) and tweak to fit your heritage photos.

Here's another idea: choose individual sets of our beautiful Page Print Templates (US|Canada) to mix into your book.  The entire book doesn't need to coordinate from front to back, so don't feel like you can't mix and match.

Not quite ready to jump into ordering a completed storybook just yet? No problem - you've got options! Simply purchase a product credit now (receiving the 25% off sale price), then complete and order your book when you're finished! Note: In order to take advantage of the sale on extra pages and the lay-flat upgrade, your book must be ordered during the storybook sale. A product credit can, however, be purchased for the base price of your storybook at the sale price so you could complete and order your book later.

Working on your pages and concerned you won't be finished in time?  How about this: another sweet option is the You Create It Custom Album Cover (US|Canada) (also on sale through June 25). These albums allow you to create your album two pages at a time. Use our drag and drop templates on the Digital Center (US|Canada) or create your own from scratch using StoryBook Creator Software (US|Canada), then order. Once you receive your album cover, add Custom Album Pages (US|Canada) over time as you complete them. Build a book as you go - at your own pace. It's genius!

PSST - as a reward for reading this entire blog post, here's a super fun link to a blog post from back in 2010 which contains a fun template with ideas on using the Reminisce Power Palette. Don't let the title of the blog post fool you - the kit is PERFECT for heritage pages :) Here are some of the pages you could create using the template and that palette:

Thanks for reading, and happy cropping!

Jenny

Creating a Heritage Album - Step 4

This is Mike’s fourth installment in our series of blog posts for creating a heritage album. Click here to see the first in this series, click here to see the second installment, and click here to see the third installment.

We are well on our way to completing a heritage album, and hopefully you are seeing your album take shape, giving you a glimpse of what your finished work may become. At this point you should have all of your pages named, backgrounds completed (or semi-completed depending on style), and your focal picture placed and sized on your pages. In this lesson we will be adding more pictures to our pages and having fun with fonts and journaling.

Whether you start by adding more pictures or other digital relics to your page or you begin with the journaling boxes, either way you will find yourself adjusting both to allow them to work in tandem, helping you make the most of each page. Below I describe methods for working with both photos and journaling boxes; approach these in whatever order makes more sense to you.

For the majority of your pages you will likely want to include more than just your single focal point picture. If you have a lot of pictures, you now need to decide which ones you will be able to forgive yourself for not using and which ones you can’t live without. There are a few factors to think about as you make your decision.

1. For some pages you may have little more than a name and dates, while for others you may have enough information to journal the entire page. Decide how much page space will be set aside for headings and journaling, and use an amount of pictures that will allow you to find a good balance between text and images. Your goal is to find create a page that looks great and is not cluttered, but also a page that doesn’t give you a case of the “I should have used and left outs.”
2. Are all your pictures going to look the same? Choose pictures from different time periods in the person’s life. While you may have 8 fabulous photos from Aunt Edna’s 63rd birthday, to shoehorn them all on the page, forcing you to omit her third grade picture, may be a mistake. Again, it is completely your choice, but keep in mind that the goal of this process is to create a family heritage album, an album that includes history, and not simply just another photo album.
3. Have fun formatting your pictures. StoryBook Creator (US \ CAN) has some great “one click” tools at your disposal. Experiment with them. If you have five pictures on the page and four are sepia tone and one is black and white, change the fifth to sepia tone to create a cohesive page. But don’t stop there: adjust the brightness and contrast. Simply put, just play. You will be surprised how easy it is to make good pictures look great by the click (or two) of a button. Remember, you can always undo anything that you don’t like.
4. Another great technique that allows you to use more of your photos and documents without making the page look cluttered is to layer them and adjust the opacity of the layers. This is a method I use for almost every page I create. The depth that layers bring to your page can enhance it enormously if done correctly.

Fonts add another personal touch to the pages and, as with the rest of the album, your font choice (or choices – no need to stick to a single font) comes down to personal preference. You know what you like. However, you must remember how much you are going to want to show your finished product off to all your friends and family, as well as Martin, the grocery bagger down at the Lucky Mart. Use something that can be read easily and doesn’t make your eyes begin to water. You may choose a fancy handwriting script for the title of the page, but it just may not be a good choice for the general bodies of text. Depending on the type of background you have used, you may also want to add a subtle glow on your text to make it really pop off the page. To save a lot of time, settle on a font early; it can be a very tedious task to go back and change it page by page by page.

Text boxes can consist of anything you choose. They may be filled with simple things, like names, places and dates, or take more of a journaling track with the use of memories or old family stories passed down through the generations. Some pages may have far more journaling than others and that is okay. Here is a tip: If you are trying to find a balance between pages that have a lot of text and others that don’t, think outside the box (pun intended!). What I mean is, fill some of the text-light pages with journaling on the town from which your ancestors came, or other historical facts that might be relevant to that time period. A simple Google search for information on the area where they lived should give you plenty to work with. What was the area known for? Were there any famous residents? That type of thing.

As we jump into the Heritage Virtual Crop this week, your project should really be taking shape and the basic look of it should be complete. Don’t get overwhelmed, we are almost there!

Go back to Step 1
Go back to Step 2
Go back to Step 3

Mike Pleice, Creative Memories Go Digital Facebook Page Admin

Creating a Heritage Album - Step 3

This is Mike’s third installment in our series of blog posts for creating a heritage album. Click here to see the first in this series, and click here to see the second installment.

Based on previous blog posts, by this time you have hopefully managed to complete your intel gathering with relatives and late-night scanning sessions. In addition, you should have created a book project and added a name to each page to help determine the book contents and length, and started to think about the design of the book. Now the fun really begins as we start to select backgrounds and add images to pages.

First, I suggest determining the general look & feel of your book, and adding background to each page. Here are several options, though there are certainly many different ideas for page backgrounds. And remember that you can always go back later and change your mind (ahh, the beauty of digital scrapbooking!):

1. The Same Background Throughout – This simple option can be highly effective: make each page background identical. This may be something as basic as a solid color or a single piece of paper. Move ahead and insert that background now onto all of the pages in the album.
2. Different Page Backgrounds – With different backgrounds, the layout of each page may be similar in style, but they will each be distinct in their own way. They still may be simple in design, such as a variety of solid colors, but they may also be far more intricate, making it difficult to do until you are specifically working on that page. An example would be using different photographs on the background of each page.
3. Predesigned Template – You should already have the names of the people on each page of your heritage album. If you decide to use predesigned pages, I recommend selecting a predesigned page that best suits that person, then adding the name of the person back to the page once you have selected the template to use. Remember, you can always add or remove photo boxes to predesigned pages, so don’t get too hung up on the number of photos on the predesigned page. You may also end up using the same page template on multiple pages in the book. I recommend not using the same template on pages that face one another, or it may make the final product look awkward and visually out of sync (unless you use a layout that’s exactly the opposite of the facing page).

They say it is almost impossible to pick your favorite child, and I suppose with most families that is true. The good news is you won’t have to in this lesson, but you will want to think about what your favorite pictures are, as they will be the focal points of your pages. Most of us will have them: that special picture of a parent or grandparent that we already know without a doubt will be incorporated into that person’s page in your heritage album. Now’s the time to add a focal point to each page. Remember: it may be a photograph, but it may also be an image of a document, newspaper clipping, or some other special piece of family history. After inserting it I would also size it at this point of how large or small you want it. This may change as you work on the page itself, but once done, it will give you a much clearer view of how much page you will have left to work with for any other photos, documents and text. So between now and lesson 4:

1. Insert and rearrange the backgrounds for each page you intend on doing, if possible (remember, you can change your mind later as the heritage album takes firmer shape).
2. Pick your focal point for each page.
3. Insert and size your focal point pictures onto the corresponding pages.

Go back to Step 1
Go back to Step 2

Mike Pleice, Creative Memories Go Digital Facebook Page Admin

Creating a Heritage Album - Step 2

[This is Mike’s second installment in our series of blog posts for creating a heritage album. Click here to see the first in this series.]

Now that you have spent the last few weeks treasure hunting, gathering intel from every family member you can think of and electronically storing it, the real fun begins.

When I am speaking with my American friends and they ask me how the weather is up here in Canada, to simplify our conversation I do a quick calculation in my head from Celsius to Fahrenheit: take my local temp, double it and add 30. So if it is +10° in my backyard, I tell my friend in Southern California that it’s 50°. The fascinating thing is when you are trying to map out the total length of your heritage album the same calculation will usually apply. If you have a 20-page book in mind, there is a good chance it will be 60 or 70 by the time you’re finished. The only “right” thing is that in the end you are happy with the work you have done.

In Lesson One you decided whether the book will be one of “length” or “width.” Now is the time to start assigning names to pages. The easiest way to do this is physically write a list of those people who you know will be included in your album. For this step I started a new project in StoryBook Creator. I left the pages blank other than inserting a line of text on each with the name of the person designated for the page(s). This will give you a good overview, a rough idea of how your album will flow as well as the possible length. I assure you, the order will be rearranged as you go, but you never lose the guideline which is the key point, remembering back to charting our course in Lesson One.

Hopefully, as you have spent the last few weeks thinking about your project, you have in mind a desired look and design for your album. The nice thing about using StoryBook Creator for these projects is that the possibilities for creative design are virtually endless. It can be as simple as using the same background for every page (which I have seen some excellent examples of), using predesigned templates, using a unique design on each page, or using a combination of design layouts. Spend some time looking at what others have done. There are always some great examples posted by the administrators and fans on the Creative Memories Go Digital Facebook page.

So for this lesson, the steps to work on are as follows:

1. Create a new project in StoryBook Creator.
2. Assign names to each page of those people you want included in the book, giving you a good overview of how it will flow.
3. Find examples of what others have done for their heritage albums and decide the design layout you will be doing for yours.

Go back to Step 1
Go ahead to Step 3

Mike Pleice, Creative Memories Go Digital Facebook Page Admin

Creating a Heritage Album - Step 1

Creating heritage albums (or family tree albums, for those more familiar with that terminology) is considered by most to be a desirable but daunting achievement. It would be amazing to have all the information gathered into a single resource (even better: one that can be ordered in multiple copies!), but where do you even begin? Over the next several weeks we are doing a series of blog posts to guide you through some logical, small steps you can take to achieve the goal of a family heritage album.

Anyone who has done any kind of family research has probably heard the old joke, “I shook my family tree and a bunch of nuts fell out.” When putting together a family heritage album you need to decide which nuts you intend to gather up in your basket, and which ones are best left to the wildlife.

LESSON 1 – Getting Started
Any ship captain worth his or her salt knows that in every successful voyage starts with charting and plotting the course. The same rule applies to a heritage album. There are endless possibilities and configurations, with no one way being more right than the other. Now is the time that you need to decide 2 key things:

1. What is the purpose of your project? Once you decide why you are doing the project, it will point you toward the right path for continuing. Answering a few basic questions helps: Is it an album for one side of the family or both? Is it meant to be an item to be passed down to future generations, in which case the journaling and stories would be as much of a focus (and possibly even more so) than the photographs themselves? Or is it just a great place to put your pictures once and for all so you can free up some space in your Power® Sort boxes? Once you decide the intent of your project, you are well on your way to a project you will be proud of.
2. Is the book going to be one of “length” or “width”? “Length” being a rundown of just how far back you have traced your family tree; “width” being more of a current version of only a few generations of your family, with as many photographs as you can find.

Again, there is no right or wrong way to make your family heritage album. It is totally up to you! But with that being said, I can’t stress enough how important it is to be a good captain and chart your course beforehand.

Once these decisions have been made, gather together all the “items” that you may want to use in the book. I say “items” and not just “photographs” because there’s no reason to limit the book to photographs only. There are so many other things that can be used: birth certificates, marriage certificates, newspaper clippings, military records, family recipes, just about anything that you can scan or take a picture of that could be used even in a very subtle way that will add meaning and depth to the page. This step can get tedious if you do not already have everything scanned or in a digital format of some kind, so be sure to have plenty of energy drinks and sugar cookies at the ready for the 1:00 a.m. boost you will need to power through. I assure you that all of the long hours and late nights doing this step will be worth it in the end, even if some things never get used. It is far better to have too much and too many than too little.

In conjunction with gathering tangible “items,” you’ll also want to collect as much information and as many family stories as you can. Another point that can’t be stressed enough: it will be worth it in the end even if it means you have to sit down for another afternoon of listening to Great Aunt Edna tell the same story 4 times. There may be a new piece of information you can glean from each retelling. Don’t be afraid to outright interview family members on family history.

To review, here are the three steps you’ll want to undertake to begin:

1. Chart your course
2. Treasure hunt
3. Gather intel

If you spend the time on these initial steps it will make creating your family heirloom far more enjoyable as we move along over the next weeks.

Jump to Step 2
Jump to Step 3

Mike Pleice, Creative Memories Go Digital Facebook Page Admin