One of the most effective ways to embellish your photo album is the creative use of text.  Text is essential to provide captions and journaling, but it is also a design element for your pages.  I love the page layouts where text forms the background – yes I am a font fanatic.  One big advantage of using fonts as design elements – they are "lightweight" elements.  They won’t significantly increase the file size of your page like some graphic elements will.  Combine text with color – another lightweight design element – and you’re off to an easy start adding sparkle to your albums. 

I do have an ulterior motive for promoting text embellishment first . . .  It’s so important to document your photos.  Who are these people?  What are they doing?  Where?  When?  The photo can’t tell the whole story – you need to complete it with captions and journaling.  In the process, let’s make the text as compelling as the picture!

There are many ways to begin collecting fonts.  Many are free.  Some come with other software.  Some you’ll actually pay for.   Here’s a list of some of my favorite font spots:

• Two Peas in a Bucket
• Lettering Delights  ($)
• Kat’s Fun Fonts
• Pixilate ($) with some free
• Pearly Gates Fonts
• Fonts & Things

When you download fonts – free or purchased – make sure you read and abide by any license/copyright requirements for that particular font.  Generally there isn’t any problem using fonts for personal use, but you should confirm that before including it in your project.

Not all text is text.

Huh?  Just because it looks like text doesn’t mean it is actual, editable text.  Many times – especially on web sites – fancy text is created and saved as a graphic file.  Lettering Delights and other scrapbook-related businesses offer graphical text.  Lettering Delights calls them alphabets and they are addictive.  When you purchase an alphabet you also get a program that allows you to create words, phrases or titles which you can then copy/paste into your photo album or scrapbooking project.  As you see from the examples below, this is a great concept and one you may want to use.  Just be aware that these are graphics and have more weight on your page than regular fonts.  We’ll discuss this more in the graphic embellishment posting. . .

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 10th, 2005 at 7:47 am and is filed under Scrapbooking. Both comments and pings are currently closed.