The Importance of Scale

Digital story and scrapbooking is fast and easy, enables multiple copies, carves far less “creative space” from your home and is typically much less expensive than traditional memory keeping. But there is one small downside, with “small” being the important word. While you’re working digitally, you don’t usually see your project at 100%. Constrained to your laptop’s screen size, it’s not always easy to judge the actual scale of your finished project. To assist you in making the most of every page inch, let’s look at some tips, tricks and screenshots that will help get size and scale into perspective.



How Big is Big?
To illustrate our discussion, let’s look at the screenshot above. It’s a page from a 12 x 12 storybook that looks fairly well laid out, right? Well check out the page below. It’s the same 12 x 12 storybook, but now you can see that the enlarged design is really an “import a page” from a 5 x 5 storybook (Michelle Wolfley’s “Daddy's Little Girl,” template 133363) that actually could fit on a 12 x 12 page four times with room to spare in the middle.



Tools for Judging
Here are several suggestions for using the space on your page well, while keeping it size appropriate.



1. Go to the size slider bar at the top of your project, just under the Heritage Maker’s logo and examine your project at close to 100% several times during your design session.



2. In the “toolbox,” go to the “layout” tab and check the size of unlocked photos against other photos you’ve published or have around the house. In this picture, the photo highlighted is about 2 ½ by 1 ½ inches. That’s about half the size of a playing card. Such comparisons can help you judge the designs you are creating.

3. Download Lynda Angelastro’s “Title & Text Cheat Sheets” to your “my templates” folder and choose “start my own.” This 5 x 5 storybook, template 17444, contains page after page of Studio fonts at the appropriate size for body text and headings on small to average pages. No need to print it, just use it to check and see which fonts work best at which sizes.

Scaling it Just Right
Ever got a book back and thought, “Wow, why did I try to pack so much on the page?” If the size and scale is off at either end, big or small, the overall design is not pleasing. Think of it like a home. If you’ve got a very small living room, you don’t try to crowd it with many pieces of large furniture. You choose fewer pieces in smaller sizes. Your page designs will benefit from the same attention to size. Use these suggestions and see if they don’t help you get the page scale just right.

Click here to start a project now. http://studio.heritagemakers.com/getStarted/

Go to my web site at http://www.OurPhotoStories.com or contact me via email at Rebecca@OurPhotoStories.com to learn more about Heritage Makers products.