Annoying Scrapbooking Trends

44 posts / 0 new
Last post

It's probably not related, but I just have to say I hate the latest trend of using planners as some sort of scrapbook. Planner addicts use the same tools as scrapbookers. A popular scrapbooking supply shop in my country has also turned into a planner haven. It just irritates me that they lug around something that heavy in their purses and justify that it's "practical".

OK, this made me LOL because although I love that digiscrapping gives me an excuse to play with all the digital stuff I've collected over the years, I still don't quite get it - and I'm having trouble letting go and just doing what I like. Although I'm known to draw outside the lines, it's usually after I feel I understand the basics, which I don't, yet.

I never did paper scrapbooking. Again, don't get it. Plus, I didn't want yet another hobby with dangerous stuff that attract me. DH already sighs and moans over my yarn and fabric stashes and the children beg me to at least reduce it (they know it will never be completely gone) before I die because they don't want to deal with it. smiley I have the same love of high-end paper, so I could totally see paper scrapbooking, yarn and fabric joining up and turning my home into a hoarder's paradise.

One of my first thoughts in looking at what other people are doing - because that's kind of how you learn/get ideas - is wondering why they bury the pictures in all that other stuff. So far, my digiscrap pages are bare in comparison.

Haha I watched my mom go through a lot of these phases when she was paper scrapping. I've just only started REALLY scrapbooking, and since I have boys I'm so OVER the tons of flowers every single kit has. I will never use all of those haha

i hear you Samantha! though to be fair...even before Little Man arrived, I would scrapbook trips/vacations and i never used the flowers!!! they drive me crazy!! smiley

Funny read. I agree with most of these. I was a CM girl for a long time but rarely used their cutesy stuff, lol.
Definitely each to their own.
I find it interesting watching the trends. As a hybrid pocket page scrapper I see so much from all over. The digital trends definitely move faster than the physical trends.
I too dislike the bulky over embellished LO. I much prefer the modern minimalist look- I find it calming. In saying that I have a few friends in the paper PL circle who do beautiful bulky/busy spreads.

Personal dislikes- the embellishment vomit or the use of piles of product for the sake of using product.
But then, that's me smiley

I find this list kind of funny... and confusing because if you were to try to figure out her style of scrapping.
It must be the old photo albums where you just slide (6) 4x6's into the photo sleeves and maybe just maybe add an eyelet. smiley

Of course, I am kind of speaking "tongue and cheek" here... but she listed almost every SINGLE scrapbook technique that exists. LoL

I would agree with a lot of you ladies that it's definitely a personal preference Especially since the layouts we create are for our families... and like one or more of you mentioned; we can always alter our layouts later if we realize we've really learned something "isn't" our true style.

A lot at the beginning of her list I agree with, I personally don't like those things myself... but most of them after the beginning are some of my all time fav techniques. smiley But I've also learned through 16+ years of "scrapping" one way or another and doing genealogy layouts, I have a very "eclectic" style all my own. I'm all over the board with what I like. smiley And it even changes with my mood... and times in my life.

Guilty!
Of quite a bit of it, any way.
I adore metal, and try to add it to many of my pages.
My dislikes/huh? things are skulls and owls. I have nothing, unless I can "finally" shoot an owl, that would go with owls. And, skulls? Just too "dark". What is the purpose, any way.
Oh! And mustaches??? Really? I don't get it.
I scrap what I like, and don't really care what others think of my layouts.

I love this thread (with seeing all of the differing ideas in scrapbooking preferences).

I don’t understand the planner thing either. My local michaels, decided the first aisle will be swallowed whole by planner land. I just want the rest of my scrapbooking stuff back.

It took me a long time to get onboard of this whole pennant/banner thing that’s been going on since 5 years ago. Sometimes I still give it the side-eye. It also took me forever and a half to warm up to anything chevron too. Still don’t know what the big deal is with mustaches either.

Quote:
The Title...FUN IN THE SUN
its overused and is really corny. I would rather see no title on a page!”

I agree about the cliches. I don’t know if it’s the aspect of just being me, where I know I don’t want to be like anyone else because I’m not, but I will go months and even years forgetting that I have any quote stacks in my collection, whether it be physical scrapbooking or digi scrapbooking. Because I hate throwing a bunch of cliches on my page. And then I look over my quotes in the kits I have, and then make a Ms. Scarlet disgusted face and throw the drawer back into the organizer and instead pull out my alpha drawer and give up on finding a suitable quote (because there’s too many cliches in almost every kit it seems).

Quote:
“I will say I cringe when I see "Live, Laugh, Love" on layouts…”

Hahaha yeah, that’s the prime example of cliches I avoid like the plague. The way I figure, if I need a reminder to “live laugh love”, then something is terribly wrong there and no amount of telling how to feel about it is going to fix that giant glaring problem. Also: see “Keep Calm and ____” (bleh), or anything that reflects YOLO.

My biggest pet peeve though, has to do more with kits: Kits that are severely pigeonholed to one type of existence and all of the stereotypes that fit it. I cannot tell you how many kits I thought looked really cool and wanting to buy for myself until I saw the overwhelming emphasis of “ROWDY BOYS and all boyyyy and Snails a puppy dog tails!” tidbits all over the kit . So, what if I want a kit that is green and stuff like that to document all of my nature walks and grungy old rusty finds? What if I want to use a kit to document all the bazillion mud pies and stuff I constructed out of branches as a kid? That’s the kind of kid I was. A lot of the girls in my family were and are also the same way too. I played with dolls too, but I was always out on some wild adventure of some kind, including playing with scrap metal of dad’s thrown out metal parts, and digging up debris from the decades old tornado that went through my parents neighborhood.

On this note, Also, all of the kits that are about the super-masculine stereotypes about whatever he-man who renovates and mr. fixit and “a man’s hobby” and whatever. News to them, that’s great and all, but it’s no longer 1950-whatever and I’m machining for a living. I like it much better when people don’t pigeonhole tooling/fixing scrappy kits and instead call them all-gender inclusive things like “nuts and bolts”. And sometimes it’s just the mere assumption of these stereotypes. How many kits assume that everyone is the same old nuclear family, with kids, and everyone fits very stereotyped gender roles (when I’m the one machining/assembling things, and my boyfriend has the people desk job)? How many kits have to do with girls and pretty much have pink all over it? I used to argue with my parents as a kid because I hated to wear pink. And it doesn’t even have to be every kit even.

There’s kits outside of these stereotypes which I buy all the time. But, a lot of designers make it their "go-to" to fall back on these stereotypes. I would just like for designers to get out of that box once and a while and actually design kits that are more universally inclusive. I think it would make scrapbooking appealing to a lot of younger people who shrugged and wrote it off as an “older conservative lady’s hobby” because they didn’t see themselves being represented in it. As a result of kit pigeon-holing, I also see stereotypical LOs that represent that. One thing that I do sigh with relief at in this place, is that all of the kits I’ve seen so far don’t tend to fall into this trap very often, and if things do, I can still take my daily downloads and get the stuff I want and leave the stuff I don’t. Congratulations, you all did well with this place.

Another thing that I don’t particularly like, is anything that reminds me of those cutesy “down home” folksy decorations. The type of rural, knicknack, stuffed rag doll people decorations where kids wear triangle dresses, have round blob heads and overly simple drawn faces with poofs of curly hair. the males are usually wearing overalls. The older people have round wireframe glasses. And nobody can go without the compulsory straw hats. I think that’s what you all are calling “cutesy stuff”, right? If you’ve been to a flea market in a small rural town, you probably know about what kind of folksy decorations I speak of. Being raised a lifelong city girl, I….just don’t understand. Obviously it exists because it floats someone’s boat though.

Quote:
“Something that's missing from the list is the sticker sneeze technique! It's my sister-in-law's favourite along with the deco scissors!”

I was waiting for one of ya’ll to mention sticker sneeze. I never heard of the term until I went on a private scrap board (that no longer exists, sadly) and saw someone refer to it and instantly recognized the sticker technique I have seen and done at so many old CM workshops 11ish years ago. It just felt underwhelming. I used to go to CM workshops all the time when I started paper scrapbooking. And then a lot of people came to the conclusion that it was kind of a ripoff to spend that much on supplies to make sticker sneeze layouts and CM fell behind the curve at new designs and techniques. And here’s the funny thing. The consultant I would go to, for every 4 pages completed, you went to the dining room table and grabbed a random unmarked bag with a photo mat or journal box or a border in it (and of course desperately hoped that it would somehow align with your scrapbooking style in some way). So as you can guess, what did this result in? People going “hm, I’m going to have a contest at how many LOs I can complete in our 4 hour timeframe!” which resulted, in, you guessed it, very simplistic layouts with…. lots of sticker sneeze.

I also have deco scissors, but most of the time I forget they exist. I never use them on photos though. Most of the time, when I use them (when I remember they exist that is), Its’s for a very thin mat that under the pic or another mat. Enough that the edge sticks through and that’s it (I also make sure I align my pattern very carefully though-- the last thing I want people to see is that I get completely outed for using deco-scissors from the evidence being painfully obvious). But 99% of the time? My deco scissors act like they don’t exist and I hardly ever use them.

On the topic of paper, I’m also team “hate busy paper.” Busy paper is like the animal print of scrapbooking. I don’t mean that in the recent last few years of “animal print is suddenly a neutral” idea. I don’t necessarily mean patterned paper, and especially not grunge patterned paper, or paper that’s been faded even though it’s patterned. When I mean busy paper, I mean it in that in a late 90’s type of "gadzooks" in-your-face animal print way, where the idea of it looks ok one day and then you look at it 3 years later and sink under the desk in horror at it being all too much (at least that’s what I do). I remember a particular zoo layout I did with super-bright busy themed paper 10 years ago, and I still cringe, but I’ve come a long way since then. If anything though I hate bright neon colors in scrapbooking more though. The only album where I’ve gotten away with bright colors is my black and white 35mm photography class album, where every pic is darkroom processed black and white, and, as a result, I have more leeway in color (the only exception being, things that are put in tinter or toner, and that’s only 2 pics). But sparingly, do I use bright bright colors though (especially primary colors though!). And it could be with how I see color too. An online quiz doodad (after that “what color is the dress?” thing went viral) said that I view color in a more subtractive way, which is probably why I like to lean darker and less contrasty.

Quote:
“Anything metal. Metal tags, bookplates, etc. This does not include eyelets, though! My own personal weakness.”

We would be total opposites in this category. Since I primarily machine metal, for my special projects at work and machining stuff I’ve scrapbooked, I’ve used a lot of metal looking things. BUT: With that said, I’ve noticed there tends to be a right way to portray metal digitally, and then there is an incredibly fake “you’re trying too hard” way to attempt to make metal. Like chrome styles that are so try-hard that they end up looking like they came from 90’s MS Word art. Or such poor quality at bumpy rust elements that end up looking like, just poor grade digi element design (that you would’ve seen in lots of kits 10+ years ago but are pretty passé now). For me it has to be very photorealistic to be believable (bonus points if it looks like that characteristically striped 6061 wrought aluminum bar, as a lot of attempts at making something look metallic fail at accomplishing the right realistic tones for aluminum, my #1 material). Also, if it’s not banded in such fake way that you swear it belongs in a “built ford tough” commercial from the 90’s. I’m pretty persnickety on how my metal embellishments look. Still, I make sure that when I do scrapbook machining stuff, that I don’t want so much metal tones that it overwhelms the page and the page looses all focus (Which I actually have seen people do that faux pas too, hence, one of my machining pages does have some glitter strips in it to tie in with all of the metal chips, but has a very slight faint pink hue to the page to make the metal stand out, and another set of machining stuff I did, I gave it that old 1950’s-1970’s warm plaid grungey old textbook look to it to give it some color).

Quote:
“I’m a photo-centric scrapper so layouts with lots of stuff and one tiny pic don't do anything for me, but to each their own.”

^^I’m the same exact way (even down to the photo-centric aspect of it.. if you want to know how to get me to purchase templates, make them double-pagers with a crap ton of pic spots in them. I end up parting with my money in a hurry). Although I do realize for those people oftentimes why this tiny little pic and tons of negative space thing might be the case though is if they have pics from an old cellphone from many years ago that took very low-quality pics (like my first phone, that motorola V series, which took very low res noisy pics), and they have maybe one pic of something, then I understand why they would take that route. I just think when people put one giant deeply shadowed and complex cluster on the page that draws attention to itself due to the surplus of negative space, the emphasis is drawn away from that one photo that matters. It just kinda consumes the page visually. And everything else falls into a void. or something.

On the topic of flowers, I’m kinda picky about flowers though. I like individual flowers when it’s one and done right. that way I can compositionally arrange them however I please. The grungier and more realistic, the better IMO. I actually enjoy buying those buckets of mulberry paper flowers at michaels and putting too much ink onto them. I just don’t like the big clumpy bouquets with very deep contrast that some digi scrap designers seem to love though. Unless a person is transplanted into a giant field of lilac bushes, it doesn’t really feel relevant to me and seems to take away from the subject matter.

I also have never really liked very light colored and super-pale stuff either (another side effect from viewing color subtractively?). Maybe it’s the after-effects of living in my parents house growing up where my dad went overzealous when I was 8 and after being at the lake with my grandma, and I came home to the entire house, inside and out, painted in country white (obviously, he bought it by the bucket). The. whole. House (minus the blue trim, because mom wanted him to actually do something with color, and the salmon pink/seafoam laundry room, where he ran out of paint, much to his dismay). To me, a giant pale (and especially white) background is trying to play it too safe but even more so, a lot of my pictures are fixed exposure-wise (with settings like levels) to where they have a good type of exposure. So, white/light paper, doesn’t really make things pop the way I want them to, it makes them look too dark-cast in comparison, and if I tried to fix it by changing my pics, it would eliminate too many shadows, therefore blowing it out of exposure, or make it “muddy” in tonality (with too many mid-tones, or with the highlights and shadows shifted too far, which means I’m losing detail).

In other words, I’m picky. And hopefully I didn’t offend a giant string of people along the way, but, we all have different scrapbook styles for a reason. The world would be a boring place without the variety.

LOL it's funny you mention the pocket trend. I'm literally only about a week or so into digital scrapbooking again after a LONG hiatus. I see these pockets things every where and I just can't figure it out. LOL

I've had those hiatuses before from scrapbooking, jump back in and go "what in fresh heck is going on here? When did this become popular?" With digi-scrapbooking it was the heavy clustering that came into existence around 2013 or so. With paper scrapping it's the whole planner thing.

There's a lot of hate in this thread smiley One of my favorite things about DigitalScrapbook.com has always been the inclusive, not exclusive, community that has been created.

I've created pages that have 1 photo and a lot of white space. Often times, it goes right next to a page that is full of photos, but I wanted to emphasize a favorite photo. Or, I have a low res photo.

I also have a planner that I use digital supplies on. It does keep me organized, and why shouldn't I be able to enjoy pretty papers and stickers instead of a plain white paper and pen?

I don't understand the art journal trend, or the extracting a photo and giving it a fairy background, but I still appreciate the work, and the art that was created.

Hindsight is always 20/20, and yes some of the trends of yesteryear were horrible in someone's opinion, but that's the same for clothes, hairstyles, food, pretty much everything. I wish the focus was on appreciating that other people are enjoying the hobby also rather than picking on how they are choosing to document.

I've done that one too, where I have one page with one photo, and the next page has a bunch. Usually it's not a tiny pic (except for my earlier cell phone photos for obvious reasons), or it's that "one photo straggler that doesn't quite fit in the other pages on the same event" or like you said, the favorite focus photo. Usually I use those pages as the entrance or the exit page on that event. It always seems to work out that way for me.

I think part of why I never got into the planner thing is that I like to use my phone instead for appointment times and reminders, as well as I use the physical calendar that is hanging on my fridge to keep things together.

I love the art journal trend actually though. I find it pretty cathartic. I haven't really extracted a photo in a while, or even used any kind of masking in a while. I was a little dismayed last time when I had an editing situation where the sky and the land on the river bank needed levels adjustments independent of each other, so I had to use a mask to separate them, got everything adjusted to my liking, and my hard drive crashed and ate my best edit of it (this is why I always tell everyone to back up). It's been 6 years and I'm still mad about it. haha.

I may look back at things I did back then and wonder why, but I don't think it's worth redoing those pages over since I find that people look through stuff not so much to be wowed so much as to remember the memories of what happened (and attempt to interpret my awful dysgraphic handwriting if it's paper scrapbooking), and i'm okay with seeing them notice that I had a natural progression in developing my scrapbooking ideas and skills over time. Most of my earlier days can pretty much be summed up in black pages, silver pen, and jewel tones. But, let's not kid ourselves, I did pretty much 90% of the stuff the OP talked about when I first started out. That's how a lot of us started out.

My God, how can you dislike black and white photos!!

Pages