Dear Digidesignresort Friends,

Please note: This is your last chance to grab the Artist Studio DVD 83% off – so do it now or never

Other than that we have MORE amazing offers and tools for your scrapbooking needs! Enjoy!

Special Offer!!!!

50 Card Making Sketchen with 3 Bonus Books! What an offer!

Find ALL new products HERE

New and Noteworthy!

Today’s Freebie is created for you by Scrapofangel!

Find out more about her products here

Freebies are only available limited time (approx. 3 days) so please hurry to grab yours.

Dear Digidesignresort Friends,

Don’t forget to grab our new Artist Studio DVD 7 for the pre-sales price!

Gift from Simplette on her Blog!

And if you want to try out the element quality – please go here:

Find ALL new products HERE

New and Noteworthy!

Today’s Freebie is created for you by Scrapofangel!

Find out more about her products here

Freebies are only available limited time (approx. 3 days) so please hurry to grab yours.

Dear Digidesignresort Friends,

Happy Mother’s Day to all of the moms, grandmums, soon-to-be-mums and anyone willing to celebrate Mother’s Day!

And here is …. (drum rolls please) our Mother’s Day Present for you! We have just released the new Artist Studio DVD 7… but not just for a GOOD price but for the BEST ever Mother’s Day price!

So…. if you do not have a Mother’s Day Present or if you just want to do something good to yourself – here you go!

Why are the Artist Studio DVDs so special?
The Artist Studio DVDs are a really unique presents because you get them NOWHERE but at Digidesignresort. They do not just offer gorgeous GIGAKITS for an absolutely fantastic price but also videotutorials with tips and tricks for digital scrapbooking – whatever DVD you choose you are introduced to the world of Scrapbooking and photo editing!

Are the Artist Studio DVDs just for beginners?
Not JUST but also because of the tutorials which help you to get started. But also if you are an advanced scrapper you will not just enjoy creating fantastic unique layouts with our included kits but you will also learn the one or other new trick from the videos.

This means that the Artist Studio DVDs are the only product on the market which does not just look absolutely professional (with printed DVD label, covers and delivered as a real DVD and not a downloadable product) but the include a massive value – you can even use the kits on the DVD for your small business because all our kits are Scrap for Hire friendly!

Find ALL new products HERE

New and Noteworthy!

Today’s Freebie is created for you by our Beachbabe Britnkaysmemaw2!

This awesome kit “Magic Breath” is now on special!!! Save 24%

Freebies are only available limited time (approx. 3 days) so please hurry to grab yours.

digital organization tips for beginners

Once you start collecting digital supplies for your projects, you’ll soon start to realize that you need to have some kind of filing system in place. Rather than waiting until you have hundreds of files, saved in no particular order, put a system in place at the start and you’ll save yourself a lot of future hassle.

There are lots of different software programs to help you to do this but they’re not really necessary. Setting up a basic folder system is the simplest way to keep your digi supplies in order. All you need to know, is how to create a new folder, just click the right mouse button and choose “new folder”.

To change the layout of how you see the contents of your folder go to “view” at the top of your screen and pick either “thumbnails” or “filmstrip” so you can easily view what’s in the folder.

Because your files will take up a lot of space, due to the fact that photographs and images take up a lot of memory, it’s a good idea to archive anything you don’t use often, onto an external hard drive. This will allow your computer run faster.

There are several ways you could organize your folders. We’ll take a look at a couple of different ways here.

#1 Set up one main folder – Digi Supplies, or whatever you want to call it. Then make a shortcut to it, so it shows on your desktop. To do this, right click on your desktop, choose “new”/”shortcut”.

Set up Sub-folders:

• Photos
• Papers
• Kits
• Elements
• Templates

Under each folder, create folders by color or style:

• Red
• Yellow
• Pink
• Blue
• Multi
• Vintage (etc)

Inside each of those folders, create:

• Seasons (spring, summer, autumn, winter)
• Valentines
• Weddings
• Baby
• Birthdays
• Family Holidays
• Special holidays (Thanks Giving, Halloween Christmas etc)

#2 Set up one main folder – Digi Supplies, or whatever you want to call it. Then make a shortcut to it, so it shows on your desktop. To do this, right click on your desktop, choose “new”/”shortcut”.

Set up Sub-folders:

Related to the months of the year (holidays)
Birthdays can go at the beginning of the year.

• Photos
• Valentines and Hearts
• St. Patrick’s Day
• Easter
• Summer
• Travel and Camping season
• General or Misc
• Templates (etc)

Inside each of the sub-folders, create folders for papers and kits:

If it’s a Valentine kit, it goes in folder “Valentines and hearts”. If it’s a general type theme then it goes in “General or Misc”. You can use a thumbnail view to see all your kits filed here.

paper prints and packs by designer
general

Also in the Sub folders, create folders for individual elements

• alphabets/numbers/dates
• buttons
• frames
• flowers
• frames
• ribbons (etc)

Obviously, these ways may not suit you but they serve to give you some idea of where to start. You might come up with a fantastic organizational system of your own, and if you do please let us know about it!

Remember to have a separate place on your External Hard Drive to keep photos and layouts, to save space on your own computer’s drive.

Happy organizing!

Printing your layouts

Printing your layouts can be a little complicated, especially if you’re a beginner digi scrapbooker. Getting your prints to match what you see on your monitor is one of the biggest challenges you’ll face when dealing with digital art or photography. There are also lots of printing options available and that in itself brings up lots of questions, like which paper should I use? Should I print from my own printer? What’s the difference between CMYK and RGB? etc.

Here are a few ideas you may want to consider before you spend a lot of money printing out lots of layouts.

Printing at home tips

If you print at home make sure that your printer profiles are loaded in Photoshop, so you’ll get a more accurate print. In photoshop look under edit / color settings. You’ll see the built in ones, pre press, north america gen purpose 2 etc. You need to add your printer’s profiles to this list. If you want to know how to do this, Macworld has a very good article explaining how to do it.

What type of paper is best to print on?

Glossy, matt or lustre? Matt is best but doesn’t show the details as well as glossy or lustre does. Glossy keeps the details, but if you touch it you’ll have finger prints.

If you’re looking for a good quality print then you will need to buy high quality paper.
Use general paper if you’re trying a new print place for the first time. Try a few sample pages, before you commit to a large print run.

RGB stands for red, green, blue. It’s the standard monitor setting but monitors can vary widely!
CMYK short for cyan, magenta, yellow, and black (not sure why the K stands for black, I guess it’s just to complicate things further

Software programs like Photoshop work with RGB, as do cameras.
A good way to test how your layouts will print is by viewing them on your monitor in both RGB and in CMYK. You can watch a video, that explains the conversion of RGB images into CMYK.

Create your layouts as 12 x 12, then flatten to jpgs at about 10 for compression. Then print the pages as 8 x 8. Keep the original files at 12 x 12 so you can make any changes at a later date, without ruining the quality.

Try to keep your design away from the sides of the pages, so things don’t get chopped off. You can always create your page as 12 x 12 and then reduce it to 95%.

Where can you print your layouts?

Blurb. Have really nice photobooks. You can download their templates. Premium paper is good for digi books. If you use basic paper, you’re not likely to get good results.
You can make huge books on Blurb and you can even make your blog into a book (if you have a blog). You can also make books using Lightroom.

Persnickety Prints use a photographic process. They have a technician there that watches what goes on, so you don’t lose anything from your layout. Their customer service is excellent and they have flat rate shipping! Their website is easy to use and they share lots of useful tips too.

Shutterfly their colors are good. They print on large sheets, then cut them down, so if your design is close to the edge, you might lose some.

Adorama  their photo books are heavy and they use a nice card stock. They also have a 10 x 10 size. You have total control what goes on the cover of your book – edge to edge, front, back or spine

MyPicTales Have lots of different photo books, wire bound, lay flat, soft cover. They also offer good discounts and coupon codes. They offer lots of sizes for printing scrap book pages, 12×12, 10×10, 8×8, 8.5×11 and 6×6 and they have video tutorials to show you how to upload your pages.

Extra Tips: Use a sharpening action before printing, for good quality prints.
Follow all your favourite printers on Twitter or Facebook so you’ll know when they have special offers and discounts.

If you have any tips or suggestions, please share them in the comments.

Our next and dare I say, completely under utilised FREE tool that Google offers is Google Alerts. You see, there’s really no need to browse the web at all. You can easily organise everything to magically come straight to you!

So, what on earth is Google Alerts then?

Google Alerts is a very cool service that searches the web for all the NEW items relating to a particular word or phrase. Let’s set one up together, so you can see how amazing it really is.

Head on over to Google’s services page and look for the following little icon:

Click on it (not here of course) and you’ll see this page:

So as you can see, we can now add a search query, for example – free scrapbook. If you click the result type (where it says everything), you are given the option to select from news, blogs, video, discussions or books. So you can choose or you can simply leave it as everything.

Next you’re given the choice of how often, which simply means how often would you like to receive the information. Once a day, as it happens or once a week.

Then you can choose how many, so you can pick from only the best results or everything. This one is up to Google and I have no idea how it decides what the best results are. I tend to change this to show everything.

And lastly, where do you want the information delivered? To your email address (you’ll need to use your gmail address) or you can have it delivered to your reader, yay I hear you say!

For this example, we’ve asked for the results to appear in your Google reader feed. So you can see, we have set up an alert with Google to bring us search results that contain the words free scrapbook. It will add them to the reader “as it happens”. So this basically means that any new content uploaded anywhere in Google from this day forward with the words “free scrapbook ” will appear in your reader magically!

So let’s start to think how we can use this fantastic free tool! Let’s just say you are a font fiend and you’re addicted to fonts. All you need to do is to set up an alerts called free fonts. I quickly did this and these are the results for today. This means that every time somebody writes about free fonts, you’ll be the first to know about it! How great is that?

You can now start to see how absolutely fabulous Google alerts is, and I’m quite sure you’re going to go crazy setting up alerts!

Let us know what you think in the comments, and stay tuned for part three.

If you’re an internet junkie, then you’ll already be wise to the tips I’m about to share,  but if you only really use the net for searching for stuff on Google or to visit your favourite scrapbooking sites, then I’m about to change the way you use the internet forever {maybe}

There are a couple of free tools available, one is courtesy of our lovely friend Google. It’s called Google Reader and it’s mostly used by people who read a lot of blogs, or by internet marketers.

All you need to have to use this tool is a Gmail account which you can set up for free here. If you already have a gmail account, login and then at the top, you’ll see a list of options.

Select more and then reader. Have a quick read through the getting started section, where it explains all about RSS. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, don’t worry. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. RSS feeds are a way for websites to distribute new content as it becomes available.
Think of an RSS feed as a file that contains a blog or website’s most recent entries. By subscribing to a site’s feed in Reader, you will automatically be notified when that website contains new posts or entries. Instead of checking sites repeatedly for updates, RSS feeds bring your favorite websites to you!

All you need to do is visit your favourite scrapbooking sites and find their RSS button. It looks like this:

When you see it on a website, clicking will usually direct you to that site’s feed. From there, you can either copy and paste the link to subscribe to the feed in Reader, or in the case of many browsers, click a button to subscribe directly.

Now all you need to do, is visit all your favourite blogs and subscribe to their RSS feeds. Magically, all your favourite blogs will then appear in your reader. Then all you need to do is open your reader every day and click through the posts in there, rather than visit each individual blog. You’ll get to see who is offering free goodies, without having to trawl through hundreds of scrapbooking blogs.

In part 2 we’ll dig a little deeper to see what else we can do with our new toy, so stay tuned.

If you have any tips you’d like to share about how you use Google Reader, please share them in the comments.

Image: DDR diane

The first thing you will need to create a beautiful digital page is a degree in digital artistic scrapbooking. Just kidding! Anyone can create a fantastic digital page, with a little practice!

One of the best ways, is to plan. Yes, PLAN! Planning is the key to developing beautiful scrapbook pages. It also saves time and we could all do with a little extra time, right? So let’s get started.

Step 1: Select Your Photographs

Decide which pictures you want to use. The pictures you choose will determine the theme you’re going to work with. For example, photos of you and your family on holiday, definitely sets a theme suitable for a one or two page layout or possibly more depending on how many pictures you want to use.

Step 2: Determine Your Theme

If you’ve chosen photographs from a particular holiday or a momentous event, they will already have a set theme. If you’ve chosen more random photos, say an afternoon spent walking in the park with friends, they may evoke a particular theme or color pattern. You can now decide whether to create your pages using an underlying theme (for the holiday idea, you could use holiday type papers and embellishments) or you can pick out particular colors that stand out in your photos and create your pages around a color theme instead.

Step 3: Plan your Layout Before You Start

Decide how you want to layout your photographs. In general, you want to focus on 1 to 5 photographs per page, anything more than that can end up looking a bit muddled. Have an idea where you will place each photograph within the page.

Step 4: Put it All Together

You have your photographs, you’ve chosen either a theme or a color palette, and have decided on the layout. Time to make a start. Be adventurous and have some fun. The pre-planning you have done will help you complete your pages fairly quickly and you should end up with great results!

This 4 step process is a great way to help you to create beautiful scrapbook pages. These techniques will work for both digital layouts and traditional paper scrapbooking. For digital scrapbooking, remember, you can move elements and photos around at any time anyway, if you’re not happy with the result. That extra bit of time you’ve spent planing may save you the bother.

If you’re stuck for ideas, remember you can always visit the gallery for inspiration!