Tip: Printscreen What You Love

Whenever I'm browsing the internet, I'm always on the lookout for awesome designs and graphic elements. If you don't know yet, I'm quite particular about what I like. I like intricate and different. Which really will not make my job of designing my own blog very easy, but I'm up for the challenge, no matter how long it takes.

So when I see a blog or website that I like a particular feature, I printscreen the part I like and paste it into a page of my Blog Design Section of my Blog OneNote Notebook. I mark down the website it's from and what I particularly like about the design: the layout, the color, the shapes, the doodliness, etc, so that there's no question later on when I go through all the websites I've noted down. I'll also write down if I think any changes would make the design even better and more to my liking.

Oh and BTW I use the program Gadwin Printscreen to manage all my printscreens. You have many useful options with this simple program, like printscreening the entire screen, just the browser window (I think), or choosing a rectangular area yourself. You can either chose to have the cursor in the image, or not. And it will save all your printscreen images to a folder on your computer, in case you don't want to paste it anywhere but just keep something for future reference. Of course it also copies to your clipboard (that virtual memory that remembers the last thing you either printscreened of copied, be it text or image) so you can paste it somewhere (in my case my OneNote) before taking an other printscreen.

The reason why I printscreen as opposed to just mark down the website whose design I like is because you never know when they will decide to change their design and your inspiration is gone. There are many designs in my OneNote that have since changed, and I'm so glad I decided to printscreen it!! Sometimes I'm even sad to see the design go because I really loved it.

I wouldn't use the printscreens (images) on the web just to show what I like without having asked permission first to do so, which is why there are no images here to illustrate my point. Maybe one day I will take the time to ask around to share, we will see.

I also have a page more for graphic elements that I like. I've looked a lot through scrapbook kits and scrapbook element designers websites to get inspiration and elements to use in my own design (mostly for free), and I've decided to try and make my design elements mostly from scratch, either from doodles I hand drawn (I'm not very good at drawing though...) or free shapes around the internets.

In that regard, I TRY to pin free stuff I like to my Free Digital Art Pinterest Board. I could be better at this though. But if you're in the marker for great scrapbook like designers, you can look through there. There's a lot of fonts in there too.

That's my tip for today!