Make Your Journaling Pop

January 16, 2008

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As all Scrapbookers know, journaling completes the story around our photos on our scrapbook layouts. Sometimes it’s just a few words, a relevant quote or even just the place and date. And sometimes it’s a word picture that takes the reader into the layout and the moment that it’s capturing. Either way, it’s all journaling and it’s all vital to the completeness of our scrapbooking layouts.

But journaling is a design element too.

Choosing your font

When you choose the font for your journaling give some thought to the words that it is going to display. Choose a font that helps to reflect the mood of the words. A stencil font will work much better on a piece of journaling of just a few words on a layout depicting a toddler than a flowing script font will.

The Internet is overflowing with sites which allow you to download fonts for free. I bet most of you already have a large font library. And I also bet that even though you might have hundreds of fonts, you still tend to use the same old favourites over and over again.

Guilty as charged Your Honour. I have been trying to be a lot more conscious of incorporating more of the fonts in my font library into my layouts, especially since I started making more Word Art, and I now try to experiment with the look of different fonts.

And when you have a large block of journaling, highlight the important words by changing their font and size, As I have done in this Reflected scrapbook layout which I made for one of my Scrapbooking Edge Video Tutorials. Make the words jump off the page. Perhaps even change the colour of a couple of words to make them stand out even more.

Positioning your journalling

Your journaling doesn’t have to take the form of an oblong box of text.

Try journaling around the outside of your layout as I did on this Gelati Days layout (thank you to Shalae Tippett for her gorgeous Renew Collection). It makes a great accent in its own right and still does the job of journaling.

Or you might position your journaling around your photo or even around some other element on your layout. The possibilities are endless.

Choose unusual shaped tags or other elements as a backing to your journaling to give it an interesting shape.

Once you start thinking of your journaling as a design element you

have a whole different perspective on it. And you’ll find it will be a more integrated part of your scrapbook layout, rather than just the words which you stick on after you’ve finished creating your layout.

How many fonts should you use on a scrapbook layout?

Well this is an interesting question. Different people have different views on this point. My personal preference is to try to limit it to three. Because you don’t want to clutter your reader’s eye too much. And I usually only use two. But really the decision is going to be determined by your individual layout. If you have a funky layout that would look good with for or five different fonts then go for it. You might want to create a bit of a ransom note effect for instance.

But if you’re just starting to experiment with using different fonts on your layout a good rule of thumb is to limit yourself to a maximum of three on a layout and vary them so that you have one decorative font (maybe a script style), one plain print looking font (such as Arial or Comic Sans) and maybe one blocky type of font, such as Impact.

Well I hope I’ve given you some food for thought in how you approach the presentation of your journaling. If you have any thoughts or favourite techniques please share them in the comments below. You know I love reading and answering your comments.

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