Make Your Own Pocket Life Journal Cards!

A very popular style of scrapbooking is with photo pocket pages. The Scrap Girls Boutique has a whole section devoted to pocket scrapbooking, Pocket Life Journaling Cards. In this section, you’ll find all kinds of pre-made cards, many with matching kits elsewhere in the Boutique. If you’re like me, these are great as filler cards, but often times I have a certain story to tell, and the cards just don’t quite fit. In this tutorial, I want to give you some tips for making your own Pocket Life cards to supplement the pre-made ones that you can purchase.

Tip #1: Make sure your shadows match the scale of your card.

Remember that you are working on a much smaller scale than a typical 12×12-inch scrapbook page. Here you can see the difference between the numbers that I chose in the Drop Shadow dialog box. The size is approximately the same, but the distance is about half on the pocket cards.

If you like to use styles for your drop shadows, you might consider ScrapSimple Tools – Styles: ATC Shadows 12601. They are designed to give you perfect shadows on smaller cards.

Tip #2: Be sure to think about visibility.

Again, you’re working in a much smaller space. If you zoom in to see what you are doing, there’s a pretty good chance that you’ll make your elements too small to be seen well at its actual size. A good way to avoid that is to periodically click View > Print Size. Photoshop will zoom to the resolution that your card will print out, showing you what is visible and what is too small to see. Make sure to especially check your fonts! They may be a little hard to read on your computer screen, but if you can’t read them at all, you won’t be able to read them when you print them out either.

Tip #3: Think about your layout as a whole.

It’s very easy to get caught up making the individual cards and forget about the pocket page as a whole. As you make each card, place it on the pocket page and think about how the cards interact as a whole. While you are making the cards and placing them on the layout, think about triangles (Embellishments Gone Wild!), the Rule of Thirds (Scrap Girls Club Exclusive: Chic Instincts), and balance (Scrap Over My Shoulder & Layout Design Process: Laurel Lakey).

Come show off your Pocket Life Cards and Pocket Life layouts in the Scrap Girls Gallery. If you have questions while making your cards, don’t hesitate to ask on the Scrap Girls Forum, and we will be happy to help you!