Wednesday, September 6, 2017

Playing with the Project Life app

In light of this week's podcast, I thought some of you might like to see some of the PL pages I've started making about this year's trip to Europe.

This page will likely be the first page in my album because it features my student group as we prepared to fly to Europe on June 1st. I may add some embellishments to the page once it's printed, but I feel good about what I've shared here in case I decide not to do anything else to it.


And here's a page I made featuring Schloss Charlottenburg in Berlin, Germany. Notice that this page is trimmed in a black background for now. My plan at this point is to use a different background color for each city OR to use one background for my solo travels and one for my student group travels. I can't be sure how I'll feel about that until I have some pages printed, but that's my thought process on the approach at this point. I've included some typed journaling and a title card, but I still plan to embellish this page a bit.


Here's an example of a double page layout that I made about visiting the East Side Art Gallery in Berlin. It was one of my very favorite things I did the entire trip, so I may need more pages about it. These, at least, are a beginning. Here's the left hand side of the spread.


And here's the right-hand side of the spread. Notice that I've left some blank spaces purposefully because I want to create a title card and some embellishment clusters on these pages. The biggest challenge I faced in this spread is that many of the photos I took really need to have full 4 X 6 horizontal spaces to showcase the artwork. I wanted to include many pics of the art, so I chose to incorporate a 4 X 4 divided page, but that meant that I was only able to capture key portions of the art. I reserve the right to add additional pages from this experience if I think I need it. :)



And here's another two-page spread that I created about visiting the DDR Museum in Berlin. Again, I've left some blank spaces because I want to incorporate some of my handwriting into the album and because I want to add some embellishments here. I also couldn't find a title card that I thought really worked with this spread, so I'll probably make one using letter stickers. The tones of these photos are perfect to use with some October Afternoon vintage themed supplies, so I look forward to getting to use some of those here. This is the left-hand side of the spread.



And this is the right-hand side of the spread. There was so much to see in the DDR Museum that I may have to add either a smaller sized spread between them or add another page. I'm reserving that as a possibility right now.



There are some things I really like about the PL app. It's convenient since I always have my phone with me anyway; the resulting pages are very clean and crisp looking; it's ultimately cost-effective since you can use the initial investment of the various cards over and over again. I think it would be the perfect thing to use for gift albums for family and friends for that reason. My reservations come primarily from user error issues probably. I've struggled to "get to" the photos I want to use as I'm creating a page because I have like 8k photos saved to my phone right now. (They're backed up too, but I haven't cleaned up my library like I should.)  I also worry that some of the pre-printed titles and messages don't really fit my life or experiences. And I've been reluctant to totally jump into this because I don't want to stop creating more tactile pages. I'm also kind of nervous about the weight and quality of printing the pages, but that's something I'm going to try this week and report back to you. For now, I like the ability to create pages quickly that I'm proud of and that document my stories. And leaving blank spaces for embellishments and texture feels like a happy middle-ground between digital and the old-fashioned way of scrapbooking.

Stay tuned for more pages and probably some aha moments in the future as I continue to work through my summer 2017 photos in this way!

3 comments:

  1. Oh, fun, thanks for sharing. This style works well to highlight your gorgeous pictures -- they really do pop against the black. If you have particular photos from Berlin that you really love, you could consider getting some 8 x 10s made up and frame them in black frames for your house! Also, I wonder if it would save you any time to create "albums" on your phone and put all the photos from each city into their own album. Then when you were making PL pages, you could just go to that album. Happy Wednesday -- hope you're having a good day.

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  2. I tried the PL app for the 1st time to do December Daily last year (thanks to you and Tracie talking about it!). I finished it and had a book printed, so thank you for the encouragement!

    You said you needed a card that said "Berlin". If you have Dropbox, you can look for specific cards like that, put them in Dropbox, and then download them as an image into PL. Just select add an image from Dropbox instead of your camera roll or instead of adding a card from a kit. For instance, here is a free Berlin wallpaper you could use as a card. I found it by Googling "Berlin graphic design": http://antoniorodriguesjr.com/freebies.html (sorry for the language on some of the other wallpapers there)

    For typing the journaling on the layouts, you can import them back into your computer through Dropbox after finishing the layout and type the journaling on the computer where you can see what you are doing. Much easier than on the phone.

    Thank you all for the podcast. It is my all time favorite and each episode is appreciated!

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  3. Amazing, this must've been a trip to remember for you and your students. This is an amazing idea that I can use to contrast my trip witch my buddies at essaypro canada and the one which I had with my Wife.

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