Ideas for Computer or Digital Scrapbook Layouts

Unique page designs and layouts make a far more interesting book. Usually a scrapbook page layout includes a place to add a photo or two and a page that has a color, texture or image covering it. Doing some digital photo editing is essential to create more options of themed images to use in your scrapbooks. More interesting pages include layout or design elements such as:

• Titles in unique type styles
• Names, dates or text on the page layout in a variety of colors and fonts
• Photos arranged in montages
• Notes and text on the page using a font that appears handwritten
• Clip art graphics and images to use as embellishments on the page layouts
• Digitally created special effects such as torn paper, drop shadows or highlights around elements
• Borders or frames around photos
• Layering of background images to imitate layers of paper

You can see how having good skills with photo editing software and learning new computer scrapbooking techniques is essential to accomplish this.

Some of the items listed above are used in traditionally-created scrapbook layouts. Adding your own “special effects” are what makes digital scrapbooking so much fun. Adding drop shadows, highlights or other special effects can be done with digital editing.

A layout with a specific theme can be very effective to add to the interest of your scrapbook layouts. Possible scrapbooking themes include, genealogy, sports, holidays, family, babies, weddings, travel or vacations, among others. The neat thing about themes is they provide a variety of images to add along with photography.

A Scanner is a Computer Scrapper’s Friend

Using your scanner and also photo editing your scans is a good way to add custom elements for your scrapbook layouts. Scanning relatively flat items can give you a library of your own images to work with in your digital scrapbooks. For instance, if you wanted to make a school theme, you could scan some items you have such as lined notebook paper, rulers, and you could even try scanning colored pencils (though you may need to do some digital editing to any scans of objects that are not flat).

To get some paper textures to use as backgrounds, try scanning birthday and holiday wrapping paper. Greeting card illustrations or photos are another resource. Be aware that scanning someone else’s designs may be an infringement of their copyright, so you can’t sell those images (but you may use them for your own book). If you want to simulate the use of ribbon, you can scan some ribbon and use your scanned images as an accent to a page.

You can also scan any traditional scrapbooking embellishments such as chip board alphabets. The scanned elements can be photo retouched and edited to add color, shadows or you can rearrange them.

There are also affordable CD ROMs with clip art available with images for themed scrapbooks. Lots of free digital kits are available, too. Images such as paper patterns, elements, and tags from kits can be used as is or modified to create your own unique digital scrapbook layouts.

Combine Traditional with Digital Scrapbooking

Just because you’re working on a digital scrapbook doesn’t mean you can’t do some hand writing, drawing or add other embellishments on the pages after you print them out. Hybrid scrapbooking is a when you combine traditional paper scrapbook techniques with digital elements. Use of a hybrid scrapbooking combination of elements is one additional way to make your digital memory books and layouts more creative.