Mobile Mini Album

I am really excited to share with y’all a little project I have been working on. I have spent the past several weeks trying to think of a good present to give to my mom on Mother’s Day. I finally decided on creating a mini album with photographs of all of her grandchildren.

I had originally set out to create a traditional or hybrid album, but in the end decided that I wanted to do something completely digital. My mom loves her iPhone and has it with her all of the time—so having a mini album on her phone would be perfect. That way she will be able to easily share the layouts with others, and be able to look through them whenever and wherever she is at.

Here is what I did to create a ‘Mobile Min Album’ for my mom:

First, I looked at the iPhone specs to find out the resolution, which is 960 x 640 pixels at 326 ppi. I then created a 960 x 640 px (3 x 2 in) photoshop document and started creating layouts. Super easy, quick and fun! I saved all of my layouts as jpeg files and on Mother’s day I will upload the photos onto my moms phone—I can’t wait for her to see the album!

Here are a few of the layouts that I created:

Aren’t they cute? This could also be done with other mobile devices (iPad, kindle fire, nook tablet etc.) as well. All you have to do is find out the resolution of the screen. A mobile mini album is great for a gift, or to make for yourself and is a fun and easy way to share memories with others.

Here are a few things to keep in mind when creating a layout for the iphone:

• Don’t crop the photos too small or they will be hard to see on the small screen
• Don’t set your type too small
• Make sure that all of your album pages have the same orientation
• Keep the layout simple
• Work at 100%—this helps in making sure that type and photos don’t get too small. Because of the small size, if you zoom in beyond 100% you will start to see pixelation.
• To keep my layouts nice crisp, I flattened my document and sharpened it a bit before saving as a jpeg.
• To keep your colors as true as possible, make sure that you are saving the jpeg with the correct color space (sRGB)

1 Kit, 4 Ways: Sublime

Wow, it seems like forever since we’ve had a new 1 Kit, 4 Ways, and a new collaboration. It was worth the wait, though, because this week Tiffany Tillman and Angie Hinksman have paired up to bring you Sublime – Part One and Sublime Templates – Part Two:

Gorgeous, right? I am so loving the soft, sweet feel to this kit, and I can’t wait to show you some beautiful layouts by our super talented Decorators!

Layout by Janell Nugent

Janell says: “I decided to take one of Tiffany’s templates and flipped it 90 degrees to fit my portrait photos better and then combined Angie’s gorgeous papers and beautiful elements sticking to the yellow and “greige” color combination, this layout came together effortlessly thanks to our amazing designers.”

Layout by Rachel Alles

Rachel (one of our newest Decorators!) says: “This page came together so quickly for me. The combination of kit and templates truly made it easy to create a page highlighting our daughter before her 6th birthday.”

Layout by Tiffany Bodily

Tiffany B says: “Sublime is certainly a way to state how I felt about using this kit. The soft colors worked so well to create a sweet baby page about my niece to give as a gift to my sister. I decided to shift the paper mat to the center on Tiffany’s template since I intended for this to be a one page and not a two page spread. I also adjusted the photo placement blocks to create just one long photo instead of two smaller square ones. I played off of the template design’s title and used the stroke feature in Photoshop to create a cohesive title. The only additional item I added were some stitches from Karla Dudley’s Essential line.”

Layout by Katherine Hansen

Katherine says: “I love Tiffany’s layered templates – it makes pulling together a page (or two) so easy. I added a frame over one photo, to make it a focal point, and to help it not get so lost against the larger photo on the left. I also placed some of Angie’s paper in photo spots. Speaking of Angie’s papers, when I saw the brown / orange / yellow combination, I immediately thought of summer, and then knew the layout I wanted to do. The addition of a few flowers enhanced my “sun” theme.”

Beautiful pages, from a truly beautiful kit. So, are you ready for your chance to win both Sublime – Part One and Sublime Templates – Part Two? Comment here, and answer this super easy question:

Summer: Sublime or second-rate?

We’ll be back next week with our winner, but in the meantime, be sure to stop by this weekend when Angie’s and Tiffany’s shops will be on sale. You can score some great deals, plus grab some free kits and dollar kits, too!

(Congrats to Annette, who wins the Office Space collaboration! I expect to see some layouts about those old jobs now… you’ve got no excuse!)

iNSD Winners!

We hope you enjoyed the 2012 iNSD Celebration here at Design House Digital. Big congratulations to our winners:

• Our random forum poster (who wins a free class of her choice at reneepearson.com) is jmarqstar65.
• Our random gallery commenter (who wins a free DHD hoodie) is runnergirl.
• Our random gallery uploader (who wins a $25 print credit at Persnickety Prints) is purplerara.
• And our Layout Challenge Winner, who completed all 26 challenges (and wins a 12″ digital photo frame) is Kate.

Congrats, Ladies, and watch for an email from us! And for those who’s names (sadly!) aren’t on this list, be sure to check out the blogs in our blog hop if you entered any contests there… we had quite a few going on!

Layout of the Week

I hope everyone enjoyed the DHD iNSD festivities! There are so many amazing layouts in the gallery this week! As usual it was difficult to choose just one! This week Tinkelbel won me over with her Four Smiling Faces page.  I love the layering effect she created with the papers and elements, and the colours are all so warm and inviting. She finishes it off nicely with that wonderful photo treatment.

Thank you, Tinkelbel for sharing your fantastic layout with us!  For that, you’ve won a $5 DHD gift certificate!

Would you like to see your page featured as our Layout of the Week?  It’s easy…upload your pages (using at least 50% DHD product) to our member gallery.  We’ll choose a new Layout of the Week each Tuesday!

4 Play

Welcome to this week’s 4 Play.  Hopefully you are not all scrapped out from all the iNSD happenings this weekend and still have a little energy left to play along with me this week.  I hope you find this week’s picks as inspiring as we did.

This week we scrapped with the following fabulous kits (each image is linked to the shop):

Here’s what I did with them:

Layout by Jennifer Flaherty

I couldn’t let such a fabulous set of brushes go without making them center stage on my layout by layering several of them on one layer and clipping my photo to it.  I then duplicated my brush layer, enlarged and rotated it and then clipped one of Deena’s papers to it.  I used one of Erica’s papers for the background and tied both sets of papers together by adding the strip along the bottom which contained both the brown and blue colors.  I then finished off the page by adding in some of Karla’s amazing elements.

And here’s what some of the other Decorators did:

Layout by Jennifer Valencia

Jennifer Valencia said:

I loved the neutral color palette for the papers and many of the elements, and matched them up with a super-sized photo of my daughter at the beach. I framed a smaller photo using Karla’s Felis embellies, and framed one of Deena’s gorgeous papers with another Karla frame. I used one of Erica’s delicate grunge brushes to add a “fake cloud” behind the photo frames and to add some texture to the sand near the wordart; I clipped one of Sara’s papers to the brushes to add just the right touch of color. I loved the way all the kits came together here!

Layout by Liz Jutila

Liz said:

Recently we had a scraplift challenge at DHD in which the original lo had little strips of pp sewn above and below the photo. I wanted to incorporate the idea of the little bits of pp and different ways of adhering paper to a lo, and came up with three different “anchors” for my pp strips: stitching, an eyelet, and that gorgeous fabric flower from Karla’s Felis embellishments. I have to admit I’ve been wanting to use Deena’s treebark pp’s for a while, and I think they really add great contrast to the light polka dot paper of Sara’s that I used for the background. I really liked the way Erica’s full page edge brush (which I re-colored) scuffed up the edges without detracting from the main focus. I also re-colored the butterflies (I could seriously use Karla’s butterflies on every lo!) to make the color composition a little more cohesive, and I love the results.

Layout by Tiffany Bodily

Tiffany said:

I loved the neutral color theme this week with only the small splash of color in the elements. I chose to keep the “splash” very small with only a little of the pink flair showing and the rest of the layout I kept very earthy. Erica’s brushes were very useful in toning down the blue in Sarah’s pattern papers to make them more cohesive with the design of my layout. As a final step I applied a black and white filter to my photo and then lowered the opacity until I liked the tones of the photo on my page. I really enjoyed working with this week’s picks and hope you will too.

(Congratulations to Beatricemi for winning this week’s DHD Gift Certificate for participating in last week’s challenge with her layout Jack and Charlie.)

Don’t forget that today only (ends Monday at midnight PST), you can get each of these kits for only a dollar, and one is even FREE!  So go grab them, and then play along.  Upload a layout using these four kits to the DHD gallery by next Sunday, then come back here and post a link to it.  Not only will you learn to stretch your kits, but you could win a gift certificate to DHD!