Communication via email has become a way of life for most of us eradicating need for the traditional hand written letter. It's as very much a part of both our private and professional lives providing both a means of sharing information as well as a virtual record of how we spend our time.
What we write tells much about who we are. Emails should and need to be included in our scrapbook pages because they are an important part of our story.
Selecting Emails. We tend to document the moments, photos and stories that are in some way memorable or meaningful to us. Use this same criteria to also select email content worth documenting. A layout can be based on one or a series of emails with a focus on planning of an event, a conversation, an update, sharing of an experience or information, or a simple letter for example.
Incorporating the text. There are several ways to get the text from an email to your layout:
- Copy and paste the text into a text box or text path or create a custom piece of WordART using varying fonts and differing sized text. The latter is a great way to make the text a focal point in your page.
- Take a screenshot of the email and import into Photoshop. You can enlarge the image by about a 1/4 - 1/3 before you typically begin to lose noticable resolution. This method works particularly well if you prefer you text to be understated.
- Print the email and scan into a digital .jpg format. The process of scanning can create some shadowing and add digital noise to a scanned piece, especially if your scanner bed is a litte dusty. This can add to the charm of any scanned text after which words, sentences or paragraphs can be defined as brushes or cropped into pieces or strips
Ideas for Creating Email Layouts
The possibilities for including emails in layouts is endless.
Journal with words from others. This is a layout about Ella and her new panda hat. The email received from my Mum after sharing the photos echoed my sentiments and provided the perfect journaling for my page. I copied the email text into a simple journaling box and applied a serif font.
Document a period of time. A series of emails over a period of time can provide great insight into the both the everyday and siginificant events in a person's life. This could include the college years, the first years of marriage or motherhood, retirement or travelling adentures.
Kerry's eldest daughter traveled to Israel, Jordan and France a few years ago and it was her first big adventure without the parents. Kerry kept all the emails from the girls on their travels...a mix of short check in type notes, long emails detailing their adventures, and at least one email from her worrying about their safety. She amassed the emails and condensed them to create a short story which was then paired with photos from the trip to create a single page summarizing the event.
Kerry adds: "I am a saver of emails from family members. I've long been saddened by the demise of the written letter because it is such a tangible link to the past. I've kept all personal emails in the hope that I would someday have a method to preserve them in a more personal and meaningful way than on my computer hard drive."
Kerry used the masks in the template to house some of her journaling. Look for solid neutral areas in ArtPlay Palette backgrounds or customize them with solid transfers or clipping masks, cards, tags, labels to create areas to accomodate large pieces of journaling.
Capture a conversation. Email exchanges between 2 or more people happen just as often as they do when people meet in person, the difference being that email provides a record of each person's contribution. A conversation between two people can tell a story just as well as a narrative piece of text with the added bonus of providing more than one perspective.
Barb's layout is about a conversation she had via email with 2 of her friends.
She created text boxes to constrain the pasted words from her email, preventing the text from being pasted in a long line. She also copied the time and date stamps, and created separate text lines, purposely selecting a different color and font for emphasis.
Barb adds, "The last text box overlapped the stormy sky from the photo, so I rasterized the text, duplicated the layer, and then changed the text color. By doing this, I could mask the upper layer and let the darker text from below peek through where I wanted it to."
Strips of text or wavy or angled text paths would have also worked in this layout as different approach to documenting the conversation.
Document a relationship. Email allows us to communicate with those not present in our daily lives. I communicate with my Dad on a daily basis via email as he is now helping me with my business. This layout documents our relationship via email and some of the banter that happens along the way.
In this layout I introduced motifs such as text bubbles, the @ character and the envelope, a custom standard custom shape in Photoshoip, as a means of creatively introducing my theme. The title was created using words extracted from some of our email conversations.
Make something from nothing. Sometimes the most meaningless junk/spam emails can spark a more meaningful story, as was the case for Chris' page "Why our grandparents have such fond memories of their youth".
Chris admits, "You know those annoying forwarded emails we all get, adding to our already long list of unread emails? I usually discard them without even a glance, but this one looked interesting. Maybe it was the title "Why our grandparents have such fond memories of their youth". So I clicked on it and was delighted by the vintage labels until I noticed the words "cocaine" and "heroin". What was this about? Of course, I read further and was amazed how often these drugs were added to everyday medications in the early 1900s. It's no wonder they were called the 'Good Old Days'."
She kept the email and had fun making a meaningful layout from the inspiration. She created a screen capture of the email address and used the fwd bar to copy it onto her layout. She also located the Gmail logo by doing a search on the internet. The labels and journaling were copied and pasted directly from the email to her page.
Create a layout about you. Use the emails you receive to create an AAM page and the role email plays in your life, as demonstrated by Eszter. She toook snippets of many different emails and posts creating a story about the interactions she has with different people across countries and continents. She created separation between each snippet by alternating her text in two different colors.
The fading of the text can be achieved by clipping the text to a mask or distressing the edges using a layer mask + AnnaBlendz Basics No. 1 BrushSet with the paint brush tool.
Think beyond email. Email may not play such a big role in your life but other types of social media such as Facebook or Twitter or simple texting might be you preferred mode of communication. Facebook is part of Jana's daily routine and is a way for her to keep in touch with her family and friends. She used the recent OScraps Facebook Collab Kit to create a page that is reminiscent of a Facebook page.
Jana adds, "I went to Facebook, chose a recent post and took a screen picture (command+shift +4) on my Mac. Screen captures can also be made on a PC and cropped to size in Photoshop."
If you haven't considered incorporating email into your scrapbook pages, then perhaps you will now. Email and social media provide a constant stream of available text relevant to who we are and how we spend our everyday. This is very much a part of what we do in scrapbooking. Use this information to your benefit and start incorporating emails in your scrapbook pages today.
Supplies for the example layouts supplied by AnnaAspnesDesigns unless otherwise noted.
