Welcome to Design House Digital’s School of Design. Today, and every single day in September, we’ll have new blog posts; informative, detailed, and FREE classes that will take your digital scrapbooking to the next level. Each subject will have a new post weekly, and at the end of the month you won’t believe how much you’ve learned!
In order to achieve maximum usefulness (is that a proper phrase) from your template library you need to be able to find your templates when you are ready to use them. Just as there are multiple ways to tag or identify your scrapbook kits there are a variety of ways for you to store your templates.
In preparation for writing this lesson I did a survey of the DHD Decorators to see the various ways that they store and sort their templates.
It appears that the most used method for storing templates tended to be sorting or tagging them by the number of photos on the page. While, admittedly, this isn’t the most glamorous method it does serve a functional purpose and make retrieval of templates quick and easy. Inside my scrapbook folder on my hard drive I have a folder for templates and the following sub-folders:
- One photo
- Two photos
- Three photos
- Four photos
- Five or more photos
- Double page spreads
- Non layout templates (I use this for hybrid and card templates.)
The next most popular method of storage for the DHD Decorators was to sort and tag by designer. DHD Decorator Jennifer Valencia chooses this method for her template storage. “I actually group everything by designer as well, and just look at all my preview sheets to see what is in the folder, since I make copies of every preview sheet and store them all in each designer’s folder. I know it’s not very “organized” but it really works for me!”
Another suggested method would be to sort them by design style.Style tags could include:
- clean
- clustered
- blended
- blocked
- graphic
- asymmetrical
- paper piercing
- masks
- journaling
- non-photo layouts
The most important part of tagging, sorting and storing templates is to find a method that works for your scrapping style. If you start with the photos in hand, you might find it easier to sort by number of photos. If you are a person who scraps a layout first and them finds photos to match than one of the other methods would probably be more useful.
I’m certain that many of you have developed systems for your template storage and I would love to hear from you. Take a couple of minutes and tell us how you store your templates.
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Tags: Renee Fink, School of Design, Storage, Templates
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