How I Made My E-Scrapbook: Part 1

Enjoying my latest scrapbook on the iPad mini with some coffee!

So last post I wrote about how I came about deciding to make my E-scrapbook for our most recent Disney trip. If your curious how I got to this point, you can check out the post here.

So how did I make it?

First off, I had to do some research. I knew there had to be some sort of software out there to do it, question was, how much? Not five minutes later did I find a post through my Google search talking about iBooks Author. Not only did it create some fun ebooks, it was free! Amazing!

After downloading, I found a Youtube on how to use it! Check this small tutorial out!



The widgets are awesome and really sent my creativity into overdrive. In order to create them, I had to make my layouts that I created in Photoshop PNG files, with appropriate "holes" to allow the widgets to show. Then, when I inserted the PNG files into the book page, I would send all my widgets to the back of the page so that they were nice and framed by my layout. However, I learned a few things about what I needed to do in Photoshop to make my layout designs work:

1. Many times, the widgets are not able to be rotated. This threw my normal "off-kilter" style of scrapbooking for a loop. I like things to almost resemble a smash book on some pages, but I couldn't do that if I wanted my widgets to match the holes made for them in my PNG files. 
2. I couldn't use the gallery widget and keep them behind the PNG files. This would cause a ton of my decorations from my digital scrapbooking to be covered up. I solved this by creating Keynote slideshows of my photos and inserting the keynotes into the page. It's an additional step, but looks much better!
3. If you want journaling cards behind scrolling widgets, you can set the opacity of the fill to 0% to allow for that to show through. Just be sure to set the line stroke to "no line" so you don't have a weird line around your text!
4. If you want to have a pop-over text box, you need to have the photo inserted in the page via iBooks Author. This makes design a challenge as you need to make sure the widget from one photo isn't bleeding over into the hole of another widget. Frames became my friend to hide these overlaps!
5. If you wanted to actually publish your book to iBooks (I didn't want to) you need to keep it below 2G of file size. This is important to keep in mind as you insert videos and media!

Next time on the blog, I'll walk you through my work flow of how I created the book!