Creating Keepsakes: A Hit and A Major Miss

In the past week I got my hands on two new publications from Creating Keepsakes: their revamped January 2008 issue, and the “Super-Fast Pages with 4×6 Photos” special issue. One of them was, in my opinion, a major hit, and the other a major miss for the magazine. Let’s end on a high note, and take a look first at the miss.

Unfortunately, for the staff at Creating Keepsakes, I think the newly designed January issue is the major miss of the two publications.

The cover was the first tip-off that this redesign was a major shift in direction for the magazine. The content changes are global. While the content has not shifted as much to “lifestyles” as many had feared based on the cover when it was initially revealed, the content has shifted in other dramatic ways. The scrapbooking content is now more “high concept”, devoted less to scrapping the basic record of our life events that most scrapbookers engage in and more to the  idea of “scrapbooking as a life journal” which is espoused by CK designers such as Ali Edwards.  The featured techniques are too complex for the typical scrapbooker who is more concerned about the  volume of scrapbook pages they create than about creating frameable wall art.

The “CK latest & greatest” column is confusing in its content. It is subtitled as 10 favorite finds but several of the products in there have been available for quite awhile, while some are literally just hitting the shelves now. Is this a thinly veiled advertising section, Emily Magleby’s favorite products that has been poorly labeled as “latest and greatest” since all the products aren’t new, or a poorly assembled “latest and greatest” column? I can’t tell.

But perhaps the worst thing of all about the new Creating Keepsakes is the design of the interior. The pages are cluttered and assault the eye with no flow to pull the eye through them. It is hard to tell where articles start and end. Frequently one article ends on the left page with another one starting on the right hand page. Articles are chopped up to allow ads to be put opposite the starting and ending page – instead of a two page article being laid out as a spread, it will start on the right hand page with the second page being on the overleaf. This makes for choppy reading and difficult-to-follow articles.

All in all, this redesign gets a major “thumbs down” from me. I’m very disappointed in Creating Keepsakes because I know that they can produce materials that appeal to the mass-market scrapbooker. They did it just recently with the “Super-Fast Pages with 4×6 Photos”.

The meat (or should I say “bread and butter”?) of the scrapbook market is made up of scrapbookers who are casual about their hobby. They don’t pre-plan their pages to order the “right” size photos, they don’t know one “celebrity” designer from another (and don’t care), they don’t know who the latest trendy company is among the “vogue” scrapbookers. These scrapbookers grab a stack of photos and go meet with their friends for the evening and create a half-dozen pages in a sitting. They don’t know or care that themed embellishments are considered “out” in certain quarters of the industry.

Creating Keepsakes catered perfectly to those scrapbookers (and those like me who are trying to learn to be more like them) with 4×6 Photos. The book is divided by sections of the number of photos on each layout, and features both single and double page layouts. Each section features a variety of styles: graphic, simple, collage, and shabby. But the common thread is that no photo is larger than 4×6.

Some of the layouts feature all of the photos used as full-size 4×6′s. Some layouts show photos cropped down smaller. Some of the layouts could be duplicated very quickly and some more complex embellishments would take longer. But no matter the style of a page, the bare bones of its photo arrangement could be used by a scrapbooker to create a layout in their own style.

The design of this special issue is clean and uncluttered. Only one layout is seen on most pages, along with a note or quote that highlights an important lesson from the layout on some pages. This format makes it easy for the reader to follow the lesson to be learned from each page. (While I realize the special issue doesn’t have to make room for advertising like the magazine does, CK has proven in the past that their magazine pages do not have to be as cluttered as the new design in the January issue. The contrast between the January issue and this special issue just highlights the lesson that sometimes “less is more”.)

I’m not sure that I would be renewing my CK subscription if it was up for renewal anytime soon. Fortunately for them, they will have a little time to win me over before I have to make that decision.

But in the meantime, “Super-Fast Pages with 4×6 Photos” will be on my table while I scrap.