I never cease to come upon new forms of and uses for storytelling. Just discovered a site and blog called We Are Storytellers, which focuses on “digital scrapbooking” or “digi-scrapping,” which I’d never heard of. The illustrations of digi-scrapping pages look as though they are photos of paper scrapbook pages, but apparently they’re not — they’re all digitally generated.
I’m curious about the use of digital scrapbooks. Do people print them out? The fact that pages seem to be the same standard 8″ x 8″ as paper scrapbook pages suggest that perhaps they are meant to be printed out.
The discovery was timely for me. I’ve dabbled a bit in paper scrapbooking. And as I look at the digi-scrap pages at We Are Storytellers, I realize the photo-montage I made for my husband for Christmas (don’t worry, I don’t think he reads A STORIED CAREER) resembles digi-scrapping. I also just got an online family-history calendar from my sister Robin, who has been immersed in researching family history most of this year.
I’m intrigued to learn more about the software tools digi-scrappers use because I had a heck of a time finding the best tool for my photo montage. I ended up with ComicLife, a very nifty program that came bundled with my desktop Mac. Might seem like an odd choice, but it did nearly everything I needed it to do with drag-and-drop ease.
I’m also intrigued that We Are Storytellers sells products — borders and bits of artwork and so forth for digi-scrapping. I’m kind of tempted by some of these as they’re pretty cheap. I might use them for future photo-montage-type projects or for Web design. Or maybe right here in A Storied Career. The site also sells classes, such as a self-paced journaling class.
I’m surreptitiously sharing the photo montage with you as a pop-up (View image) because it’s kind of big and personal to impose on you right here in the blog. It commemorates 2008, a superb year for us. Probably the best year of our marriage.