I've been adding some content to the photo albums section of the site and it really is nice to see these disparate projects coming together as a body of work. Before, I just stuck things inside a manilla folder called "work samples" and left it at that - but to see it in this format is interesting and I feel very hopeful about the the way the work continues to change, depending on the influences in my life at the time.
The section in the side bar called layouts, is set aside to show the design of my own stories. This is something new to me. Some people call it scrap booking. That's fine, but to me, it is documenting my life stories and bringing them together with pictures. This isn't totally new and I don't fully take credit for this philosophy. A little background:
When my oldest daughter started kindergarten, I volunteered to do something called the "memory book" for the class. At the time I had no idea what that meant. Really, I didn't. I just knew that I liked doing design projects and that this might be something like that. Turns out the project needed to be duplicated for 15 families + the teacher. I approached it much as I would any other job. What would be the concept? What would be the visual anchors? What color scheme would be best? What message would I convey? It was all done digitally and printed on good stock, then assembled by hand and it turned out to be a truly fascinating undertaking.
My involvement on the memory book allowed me to see deeper inside the daily happenings in my daughter's classroom; a part of her life I would otherwise not share. I got to know the other families whose children's lives I was putting on the page. As I formatted their pictures, making sure each one had fair coverage, I felt I knew them a little better too. I began to think as I attended the class plays, etc. how I could translate it to the page to really capture the essence of the time and place. I thought about those times more, I might even have appreciated them more simply giving them more of my attention.
In the two years since that time, I haven't done anything similar. But just before Christmas I found a book on Amazon that appealed to me: A Designer's Eye for Scrap-booking, by Ali Edwards. I wrapped it for myself under the tree. As I read the book and looked at the lovely content, the message she conveyed really resonated with me. It made sense. This was what I wanted to do: document the unique stories of my life and my children's lives. This was one of those books that changed the course for me. Maybe some book as affected you in a similar way.
Since then, I made a point to meet the author and try one of her projects. More on that in a future post.