Design School ~ ECBARF

I believe the saying is: 'a little bit of knowledge goes a long way' but that's not the case with design and scrapbooking. Learning a little bit about design basic design concepts can make a big difference to your layouts. So every second Sunday for the next little while we'll have a post that outlines one design concept and gives lots of visual examples to help you understand the concept. I'm not an expert in design at all but I have learnt a lot along the way and hopefully will be able to help you gain some understanding as well.

Design concepts give you a scaffolding to help you make a page in a style that you enjoy which pleases the eye. You'll no doubt have had those moments where you've made a page and something doesn't look quite right- it likely has something to do with one of the design concepts that we'll be talking about. Hopefully by gaining some understanding you'll be able to develop your designer's eye and solve some problems or just give your pages that extra polish.

So coming up over the next couple of months I'll be talking about ECBARF! That's an acronym that many use to help remember the concepts they need to keep in mind.

In brief....

Emphasis - The Emphasis on your scrapbook page should be on the most important element. Most times that will be the photo(s), but it may also be the title or journalling and in some cases a Motif or element you have used in place of a photo.

Contrast- Contrast is having elements that are distinctly different from each other- like a darker photo on a lighter background. When we add contrast to our page it helps us to show the emphasis and it adds visual interest rather than everything blending in together.

Balance- Balance speaks about how we distribute visual elements on the page. It gets us to think about weight of the elements on the page are their relationship to each other.

Alignment- Alignment is about the connections between the elements on your page: Photos, title, journalling and embellishments. The way things are aligned con create harmony and continuity- or you may choose to create discord to help tell a particular story.

Repitition- Repeating elements on your page can help create unity and cohesion- when you choose to repeat shapes, colours, lines, textures, images and other visual elements it unifies the items on the page.

Flow- The way you design your LO with all of the concepts above all comes together to create flow. Flow is the way your eye moves across or around the page- where you are drawn to first (hopefully the part you emphasised) and the way you move through the remaining elements on the page.

We'll also touch on using white space and not having trapped space.

Look out for the Emphasis post on the 17th. Until then maybe have a look at some pages that didn't feel quite right and think about the elements above to see where you might not have got it quite right. Or see which of the various elements you can find on my page below....