White Space

Okay, I know the only things I've been posting lately are layouts that I've done for my Design Your Life online class with Cathy Zielske. And, yeah, this is another one. But I am finding this class to be so interesting, and so eye opening, that it's making me feel like sharing some of my work product. This week, we have been studying white space and how to use it in designing scrapbook pages. Well, I thought I knew all about white space, but it turns out that I knew a little and learned a lot!

Cathy generally provides templates or sketches for us to use for our assigned layouts, and we are free to tweak them and make them our own. For this layout, I decided to follow Cathy's sketch pretty closely. One of the benefits of following someone else's design rather closely is that you get to see how your own photos and stories play out when used in a design style that may be pretty far from your own. This layout is a great example of what I mean.

I often mat several photos together and then use that large element on my page. But I would not typically leave the amount of space around the central mat that we were supposed to on this page. As soon as I finished this page, I saw what the effect of that was -- it draws your eye in, right to the focus of the page.

Another thing is leaving equal borders around the photos on a page. I typically don't do this, because, frankly, it can be a pain in the butt to get those borders absolutely accurate (even though I'm a pretty good eyeballer). So, much more often, if I have photos in a line or a linear grouping on a page, I just jam them up right next to each other. While that isn't necessarily a bad approach, I'm finding out why there is almost always a border of white space around photos and similar elements in advertisements and other printed materials -- because it looks great and it forces your eye to zero in on the photos, but in a calm and unhurried way. I see much greater use of my quilting ruler in the future!