Digital

Digital Designers | Katie Pertiet

March 28, 2012 by Stephanie Vetne 6 Comments

[Editor's Note: This author is a long-time member of the Designer Digitals creative team.]

Meet the Designer | I am happy to introduce you to an incredibly talented designer that you are probably already familiar with – Katie Pertiet. Katie is both the owner of, and lead designer at, Designer Digitals. I hope you enjoy getting to know her!

Katie’s Background | Katie grew up as a middle child of four children and earned a degree in graphic design from Iowa State University. After working at various ad agencies in several design positions, she started her own business in 1993 and freelanced for textbook publishers and corporate design departments. She has been a hobby scrapbooker and photographer since high school and worked as a professional photographer in college. Combining those two loves with her extensive design experience led her to digital scrapbooking in 2004.

Just a year later, she founded Designer Digitals and then found herself moving across the country. With the move, she decided to forego developing a new corporate client base and instead focused all of her energy into building Designer Digitals.

Katie’s Style & Inspiration | Katie’s style is varied – she designs vintage products as well as products with a more modern, graphic feel. She seems to effortlessly bring together vintage-based products and the art world to create timeless designs. As she says, “ I can easily go from designing vintage products, to whimsical graphic, and everything in between.” When asked about her favorite style, it was an easy answer, “My favorite things to create are vintage products.” Katie is very open to inspiration in the world around her and finds inspiration everywhere. “Advertisements, music videos, magazines, the mall! It all stirs up something!” [Read more...]

Filed Under: News Tagged With: Designer Digitals, Digital, Katie Pertiet

Digital Trends | Pastels

March 20, 2012 by Stephanie Vetne 3 Comments

With spring just around the corner, it’s no surprise that we’re seeing lighter, softer hues in the newest digital products to hit the stores. Pastels are popping up everywhere! Here are just a few of the pastel digital products that caught my eye this week.

Sweet Shoppe Designs

Two kits at Sweet Shoppe Designs immediately drew me in – a beautiful banner kit with optional stitching by Traci Reed and a lovely faith-based kit by Kristin Cronin-Barrow.

Traci Reed’s new banner kit includes a lot of options – six different kinds of banners and 15 pastel colors.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: News Tagged With: Designer Digitals, Digital, Sweet Shoppe Designs, The Digichick

Digital Trends | Chevrons

March 6, 2012 by Stephanie Vetne 1 Comment

Chevrons have been trending for a while now in the home decor and fashion markets. Our Trend Watch spotted them in the paper scrapbook market a little bit ago. And now the inverted V-shaped pattern has hit the digital scrapbooking world, too. Here are just a few of the wonderful chevron-patterned products that caught my eye recently.

Jessica Sprague

KI Memories and Linda Roos both have some newer chevron products available through Jessica Sprague’s Digital Store.

The KI Memories “Hot Date” collection (originally offered in print form) offers bright colors and fun chevrons throughout the collection. What really caught my eye, though, was the neutral alphabet with a tiny chevron pattern – just lovely!

[Read more...]

Filed Under: News, Trends Tagged With: Designer Digitals, Digital, Jessica Sprague, KI Memories, The Lily Pad, Trends, Two Peas In A Bucket

Printing Digital Products: Which Paper To Choose?

January 24, 2012 by Stephanie Vetne 13 Comments

Editor’s Note: With this article, Stephanie Vetne makes her debut as a Contributing Writer at Scrapbook Update. We hope that you enjoy her expertise in digital scrapbooking. – Nancy

As a mostly digital scrapbooker, I am often asked about printing options for my layouts and digital supplies. People want to know how I print my layouts, and how to print digital supplies for use in hybrid projects. One of the most common questions I get is “which paper should I use?”

For layouts, the answer is easy – high-quality photo paper works best for printing. Photographs are usually the highlight of any layout, and photographs always look best on photo paper. My personal favorite is a matte or luster finish but I know plenty of other digital scrapbookers who prefer glossy paper. As long as it’s photo paper, any of the finishes are just fine.

But when you’re working on hybrid projects that use a combination of photographs, paper supplies, and digital supplies, you have a lot more options. I print all of my photographs on photo paper but I mix it up a lot more when I print digital supplies. Let me show you why other options work just as well for digital supplies.

Here I started with the journaling cards from Katie Pertiet’s Labeled Journalers No. 4 from DesignerDigitals.com.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Play Tagged With: Digital, Printing

Happy Anniversary

July 5, 2011 by Nancy Nally Leave a Comment

Being a papercrafter, I really want to handcraft cards for my husband for special occasions. Right now, that personal touch especially means a lot to add to my greetings to him.

Unfortunately, mail regulations and screening at the Department of Corrections make it somewhat difficult to get a handmade card through to my husband, as well as hard to predict whether my work of art will get to him or not. One thing that DOC doesn’t like is glued layers on an item – eliminating most papercrafting techniques. They also don’t allow any metal items, so no using brads or any of the other popular metal embellishments right now. Finally I realized that the simplest way to bring him something I created would be to create digitally. It’s not perhaps exactly the homespun, textured, imperfect handmade look I would prefer to bring him a piece of home with, but it does let me create something just for him.

I tried this for the first time with his anniversary card back in April, and was very pleased with the results.

Since I am terrible at designing card layouts, I started with an 8.5×11 template (Designer Digials – Cathy Zielske Layered Template #33) as my base and then resized it A2 card size (a quarter of an 8.5×11 sheet) when I was done.