Tips for Easier Journaling

For many of us, journaling is one of the most difficult parts of putting a digital scrapbooking page together, yet it’s one of the most important parts of the digital scrapbooking layout. It lets others know why you made the page.

I’d like to share some tips that will address the two most common problems of journaling: what to say and where to put the words.

What do you say?

When making a digital scrapbooking page about a special event, let’s say your daughter’s 3rd birthday, it’s pretty easy to follow the 5 W’s of journaling (Who? What? Where? When? Why?). However, when we want our digital scrapbooking pages to convey something besides just facts, I’ve found that Word Art can beautifully express just the right sentiment. Even better, it can also inspire further journaling. There is a Word Art section in the Scrap Girls Boutique, and complete kits also include Word Art designed to complement the mood of the kit.

Here’s how Word Art jump-started my journaling on a recent layout. While we were on a beach vacation, my husband took some striking photos of the sun rising over the ocean, and I wanted to scrap them.

The photos were beautiful, but I wanted to describe my feelings of what it meant to watch the dawn, day after day. I went through my Scrap Girls stash and found the word art “Today Tomorrow Yesterday” in the Spice of Life Collection Mini. The colors and the sentiment were just what I was looking for!

Where do you put the words?

I now had journaling inspiration, but where should I place the journaling? Scrap Girls again offers an easy solution: ScrapSimple Digital Layout Templates. The templates include a place for journaling within their design, and since they are layered, ScrapSimple Digital Layout Templates are also versatile. You can change fonts, colors, even the size of the journaling box.

For my sunrise layout, I chose ScrapSimple Digital Layout Template: Curled Paper. It contained a place for my Word Art title, a place for lots of journaling, and, of course, a place for those special photos.

To achieve the horizontal title design, I cut the Word Art apart using the Polygonal Lasso Tool (keyboard shortcut L) and arranged them across the top of my main photo. To emphasize the mood of timelessness that I wanted, I also changed their order to “Yesterday Today Tomorrow.”

All I needed to do to finish the scrapbook page was to insert my photos and papers, to journal in the box provided, and to add a few embellishments.

Using word art and ScrapSimple Digital Layout Templates make journaling on your digital scrapbook pages easier, but the most important thing is to journal. Write it down! Your digital scrapbook pages are important, and you are the one who knows the story. Pass that knowledge along!

I hope you’ll also post your layouts in the Scrap Girls Gallery. I look forward to seeing what you have to say.