New Organizing Style called Foundations

Introducing a new Organizing Style. Actually, it’s more like a whole new way of looking at organizing digital scrapbooking supplies.  Throughout my experiences as a teacher and a tagger, I’ve noticed the most difficult and slowest part of tagging is just figuring out what category something belongs in. I realized that the key to organizing quickly and decisively is having clear definitions for each category. So I took my definitions and built a new categories list from the ground up and I decided to call it the ‘Foundations’ style.

When you think about it, scrapbooking involves three basic ingredients: photos, a story, and something artistic. On their own these elements can be interesting and beautiful but together they tell your story in a powerful way.  Not every layout has to have a huge story…not every page even requires photos. But it takes art, photos, and story to make a scrapbook. And all of those elements require a good foundation.

So let’s start with the Page Foundations category. This group of categories is for things you can use to start your page off. Color swatches, page layout templates, papers, and quick pages. I’ve put textures in there because they’re a starting point to creating brushes, overlays, etc. but I could easily see moving textures to the artistic category. I also have categories for other types of templates such as paper making or for shapes or hybrid projects. This would be a good place for sketches if you like to scrap from those. If it’s a starting place, a foundation for a page, then it goes here. My sub-categories for paper have evolved over time as well. I personally use the term ’solid’ to mean monochromatic. So even with textures and designs, if it would only get a single color tag, it’s going to get a solid tag as well. But if the design involves flowers (wow, I have a lot of those!) then they’ll also get a floral tag. Iconic is for shapes like snowflakes or hearts that have a specific usage or meaning and I went ahead and did a set of subcategories there. And Patterned is the catch-all for multi-color papers that don’t fit in the other categories. If you find yourself looking for something like crumpled or torn papers, add a category for that. If you don’t look for dotted paper specifically, just lump those in with Patterned and delete the extra category.

The point is to make this list as simple as you can but with well-defined groupings. While I’m speed tagging I keep the sub-category lists closed and just tag paper with the main paper tag. Later I’ll go through and add the sub-cat tags removing the generic paper tag as I go so I know what has been sorted and what hasn’t. All PSD files to into the main templates category too…I break those down by size/shape later too. By keeping the primary level list simple, I can tag quickly and even before I sub-cat them I can at least search those main headings. This keeps me scrapping while I’m organizing.

Next time, I’ll talk about my Photo Accessories categories. I hope this new style at least helps you to start thinking in a fresh new way about your own scrapping process and your organizing categories.

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