Scrapbook Basics: The Beginning

Making a Great Cover Page

Adventure Scrapbooks tell a story.  There are lots of good ways to tell a story through your photos and momentos you save, and through journaling and personal narrative. Good papers, good embellishments, and a good layout all add to the presentation of your story. However every good story has 3 basic elements - a beginning, a middle, and an end. Here we will start with The Beginning: Your Cover Page.  

A great cover page is one of the most important elements of your book. It sets the tone for the rest of the book and give the look and feel for what will follow. Also, and importantly, it is usually the first glimpse of your work that people will see. Many times people may not look through your entire book, or will start breezing through it by the half-way point! (Especially if your books are long, like mine!) That cover page is a page that they will remember, and will either make them want to see more, or less.

Creating a good cover page is pretty easy, but you need to keep a couple of things in mind: tone, personal details, and art. 

First is the tone.  You want your cover page to reflect the content of your photos - is your trip rustic, outdoorsy, big  city, or beachy? You want your cover to reflect that. It's important to choose papers or kits that reflect the tone - or just a color pallet that reflects it.  

Second, and I think most importantly, is some personal information about your adventure. Such as: where you went, when it was, how long you were there, what did you see? If someone looking at your book is just looking a a bunch of pictures from some place, at some time, it doesn't mean as much to them and they'll be less interested in your seeing your scrapbook. Not sure what to use to make it personal? Names of the places you went, dates you traveled, who was there, maps, postcard, itineraries.  

Third is the art. Whether it be photos, postcards, or maps, you want to put one of your best or favorite things on your cover page. Make it stand out - I usually enlarge a favorite photo and double matte it, and I also like to use maps. (Often I will do an online image search for a good map that can be resized in Photoshop and I can make it fit on my page.) I have also used one favorite photo and a postcard (or image of a postcard from the internet if I didn't get a postcard while on my adventure.) to set the tone for my book.

Now, admittedly, I haven't always followed all of these things myself, as my scrapbooking has evolved over the years, these are the things I try to do now. Here are a few other cover pages I've made from a few of our trips over the years: