Foundations, Part 3: Artistic Elements and Previews

Now that we’ve organized the basics of our pages, it’s time to dress it up. I like to compare embellishments to the garnish on a gourmet meal. It’s the finishing touch that really adds beauty and personality without overtaking the main story you are telling with your journaling and photos.  So the basic list is pretty compact. This makes it fast to speed tag your PNG’s.  Just assign large groups of them at once to the main category then go back later when you have time and sort out what type of fastener or notion they are. You’ll notice I have Buttons in fasteners even though you’ll find physical buttons in the notions department at more craft and fabric stores. Remember I decided to tag things according to how they are used. But you might prefer to put them with the rest of the notions. You can just click on that category name and drag it to the notions list and drop it right in there. This system is about well-defined categories and using levels of categories to speed up your organizing routine. Because in the end, it’s really about using your scrapping time actually scrapping!

I also wanted to show you my Previews category list today.  This of this as your own personal store. When you want to scrap, you can go straight to the page kits or templates to get started. Or if you are in the middle of a page and need just the right alpha for your title, get a quick look at your alpha previews. Chances are you’ll get a better idea of how that alpha will look from that preview than from just looking at the A’s in the Text Accessories | Alphas category or facing a browser full of folders if you use the alpha keyword trick to sort those out. Addicted to frames embellishment packs? Add a category for it! You can make this as specialized as you want, just remember the long the list, the slower the tagging goes. You might be wondering why you even need to tag all your papers, templates, alphas, etc. if you’re also tagging the previews this way? Well, you don’t…really. At least, you don’t if you are happy with finding kits and elements for your pages from just the previews. I personally love the quick shopping style of search for some projects but also appreciate the close up view I get by bringing all my ribbons into my browser pane, for example. But having a well-tagged selection of previews is one of the best things I ever did to get my stash organized! And if you come back to catch the final wrap up of this blog series, you’ll see how to get even more power from your ‘personal store’ preview section!

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