Scrapbook Layout: Bowl Game and the Move to Digital

This layout is special not just because of the memories. This event marked the point where I switched from 35mm to digital photos. Remember those days? I’m extremely happy to be rid of the photo boxes, but this is a new creative path for me.

Not being wedded to 4×6 photos meant I had too many choices! I went through at least 5 ideas over 3 days before I came up with something.

My final sketch of the first page.

This was one of the most challenging pages I’ve done for this book and I really thought I’d lost my mojo for a while. Here were the goals:

• Resist the temptation to print every single picture, even if I could do tons of mini photo strips to make them fit.
• Make it interesting without having to fill the page. Filling the page completely was what I meant to do for my Big Game layouts, but I wanted to do something different here.
• Pick only the best couple clippings of all the newspapers I saved.
• Still make this a sports layout, but diversify a bit and not make the entire page blue and gold.

Here is what I came up with:

Draft of the first page.

First, I did a set of small photos running down the side of the first page.  This way I can show a few more photos but still keep some “white space.”  I added a couple larger feature pictures, a newspaper clipping and my game ticket to round everything out.

I kept the same headline style as I do for all sports pages, making sure to list important information about the game.

But how was I going to make the page different and not exclusively blue and gold?  I thought about how traveling to get to the game was a huge part of the memory.  I think we spent more time in the car than at the actual city where the game was.

Solution?  Maps.

I got a California and Arizona map and backed each page with them.  If you are a AAA member, you can get maps for free at your branch!  We drove to Phoenix, so I traced the route and circled Phoenix on the page.

Drawing the route onto the page.

On the second page, I kept it simple with one newspaper clipping and a block at the bottom telling the story of the whirlwind trip.

First digital page, down!  A lifetime to go!