Chipboard Photo Templates

Here is the layout of our family celebrating my 39th birthday.  We went roller skating at a rink near my hometown that I frequented as a teenager.  (What a fun blast from the past!  The place hadn't changed a bit.)  I took a ton of pictures, but there might be no worse place on earth to try to get decent photos than at a roller rink.  I ended up printing the eight best photos, but as you can see, I only used four of them.

Sometimes, I print just the right number of photos because I know exactly where I'm going to put each one and what the finished layout will look like.  In this case, I didn't.  So I pulled out these:

Years ago, I cut down some sheets of chipboard to make a set of templates.  Each is cut to a common photo size, then labeled with its dimensions.  There are multiples of each size.  I can't tell you the number of times I've used them.  They are so handy!

When I'm stuck on a layout, I pull out one template for each of my photos (in this case, eight 4x6's- five vertical and three horizontal) and start playing with them.  As I move them around on a piece of white cardstock, I look for a pleasing arrangement.  If I decide I might be cropping one or more photos, I swap out the template for a different size to see how that will look.  This lets me make design decisions before I ever cut a photo. 

Once I like a layout, I grab some random chipboard letters to plan where my title will go.  In this case, I knew my title would be really short ("39"), so I just put a few letters down as a place holder. 

At this point, I knew exactly what my layout would look like.  I was able to grab patterned paper, a punch, a few stickers, and a journaling pen and the whole thing came together very quickly.  Which is always very satisfying.