Inspiration Station: Photo Card Inspiration

PHOTO CARDS & SCRAPS: An Odd but Useful Couple

With GCU’s new Custom Photo Cards, artists are scrambling to figure out how to make eye-catching designs that will entice shoppes to buy. Some artists have already been doing personalized photo cards at Zazzle. Others don’t even know where to start. Well, if you’re looking for new source of inspiration, try scrapbooking layouts. Sounds crazy, I know, but it makes a certain kind of sense.

About 99.9% of the time, a scrapbook page includes a photo (sometimes two, or three, or more), and layout templates can give you ideas about how to creatively incorporate spaces for photos in your own designs. Here are some places to go for inspiration + a few other things I thought you might find helpful:

Scrapbook.com Gallery
With almost a million and a half layout templates and page examples, this is a resource you can spend days combing through. New stuff is added quite frequently.

Free Digital Scrapbooking Layout Ideas
No frills templates for you to study without the distractions.

Scrap Girls Gallery
Another place to find colorful, fun examples of scrapbook pages and get a good idea about layouts.

Photo Card Boutique
A nice place to explore. These are actual greeting cards that you can view to get a good idea of what’s hot in the personalized photo card world.

SLR Camera Simulator
This one’s a bonus for the photographers. It’s a site offering a free learning tool, a virtual simulation of a camera that allows you to experiment with all kinds of settings and see the outcome. Much fun!

Creature Comforts – Daily Inspiration
Another site offering color palettes taken from photographs. Very beautiful.

Before you start designing photo cards willy-nilly, I suggest you spend a couple of days studying the market trends, learning what’s hot, and above all, learning how to build a pleasing layout for your cards. A badly designed card will not attract buyers. Besides, you don’t want to waste your time creating cards that may be declined, do you? So do your homework first, absorb the basics, learn by example, and then have fun!

Please be aware that some  scrapbooking sites offer “free” digital downloads of things like Photoshop brushes, digital kits with cute elements, fonts, etc. I want to point out that while these are free for personal use, they are not okay for commercial use (unless, in some cases, you purchase a special commercial license). Read the Terms of Use.