To Post Or Not To Post?

We all like to share our creations with others and hear some praise of them. For many of us, it’s such encouragement that serves as fuel for our next creative endeavor. It’s why many people get into the publication side of the scrapbook industry: to be able to share their designs with many others and receive the gratification of a wide audience.

Until recently scrapbookers could share most of our work through online galleries and other venues if we wished and then remove a piece if it was requested for publication. We could have our cake and eat it too if we wished, by sharing our work with a small audience online immediately after it was created and then later sharing it with a larger audience in print if given the opportunity. But those days seem to be ending and it is creating a dilemma among scrapbookers seeking publication work about what to do with each layout they create.

In the past there were only a few major page calls each year, such as the contests for Creating Keepsakes’ Hall of Fame and MemoryMakers Masters, that required layouts to be submitted that were “unseen”- never previously displayed in any public way. But now it is becoming increasingly common for that stipulation to be attached to regular calls for layouts for books and magazines as well. And so with each finished layout we must make a decision: to post or not to post? It’s not as simple as it may sound.

If it were just a question of giving up the luxury of immediately sharing our layouts with other scrapbookers and receiving praise for them, the decision would be much easier to simply keep our work offline until it has run it’s course as a submission. But for professional designers in this industry their online galleries serve as a resumé of their talent and creativity. It is not unusual for designers to be contacted for work based on their online postings, for a layout to be picked up from an online gallery, or for team applications to require a link to an online gallery where more of the designer’s work can be seen. Reputations are often made based on that online resumé of gallery work. It’s an incredibly valuable asset for an aspiring designer.

The problem arises because there is of course a limited amount of work that any person can create. So for many of us, we are now left with the choice of saving layouts for submission or having an up-to-date online gallery that shows the true depth of our current creative endeavors. Creating a great piece of work leads to a hard choice: do I keep this unseen for restricted calls, or use it to bolster my resumé and thus limit its use for calls? There is no “right” answer, and no easy one, either.

It’s just yet another change in the workings of the industry that highlights the pressures being put on designers today to be ever more creative…and ever more productive.