Test Your Skills 3

Test Your Skills

Want to sharpen your design skills? Try taking our quiz to see if you can spot common mistakes often seen in scrapbook galleries! Use the Design No-no’s PDF checklist to help in your search.

Download the Design No-no’s PDF and print it out for reference.

Design Principles & Everyday No-No’s Challenge

Welcome to Challenge 3!

A Mirror design is actually pretty simple, but there are a few things that can trip us up. Some of those things can be a problem on any design, but others are specific to a Mirror design.

Here’s a page that has a good start but has some problems. Let’s go through the Design Principles and see how this page stacks up.

We’ll start with Focal Point. What do you think? On a scale of 1 to 5, how would you grade this page?

SEE MY GRADE

I would give Focal Point a 4. The top left photo is the main focus, and it’s a great photo. However, I think the two images should be reversed. It’s hard to see the couple in the smaller photo. If we switched photos, it would be much better.

SEE Switched photos

Here’s my page with the photos switched. I’m happier with it, and the focus better, in my opinion.

Now let’s consider Flow. How would you grade this page for flow?

SEE MY GRADE

I would give this page a 3. The two photos and the elements near the photos would give this page a strong diagonal flow, but the items in the other two corners are major distractions from that flow.

It’s really not necessary to fill up corners!

It’s possible that you could have a triangular flow with something tasteful in one of the other corners, but putting an element or cluster in all four corners creates a box that is seldom flattering.

Not only that, but the item in the top right corner is a flat item over a 3D paper. Let’s just remove the entire element, shall we? And the musical notes as well.

Adjust the Flow

Aaaaahhhh…that’s a relief!

What about the Rule of Odds?

SEE MY GRADE

I’d give this page a 5. It doesn’t have a lot of elements, but there are three elements next to the top left group. In the lower right the two flowers and the word art make a trio.

What about repetition?

SEE MY GRADE

I’d give this page a 2. The two photos are definitely connected, with my mother wearing the same skirt in both. And the word art on the right mimics the journaling on the left, so there’s a small amount of repetition.

But this is a MIRROR page!

One of the distinguishing features of a mirror page is to mirror things, which means some repetition. Instead, all the flowers are totally different and don’t even match with color.

Also, did you notice that the blue 3D flower doesn’t have a drop shadow? That’s a No-No for sure.

Let’s work on repetition a bit.