Departika, a graphic and web design studio

Art and Design

She’s Crafty

I read this snippet in Print Magazine about Jessica Helfand’s new book, “Scrapbooking: An American History”. Helfand is a writer for the Design Observer and has written many books surrounding the subject of graphic design. This particular book was inspired by her critical blog post about scrapbooking and the profound reaction to it (I recommend reading the post). It made me think about my own history surrounding scrapbooking, and how part of our business at Departika has evolved into producing products that many crafters and scrapbookers use.

In 2001, I was asked by an entrepreneur to design a logo for her new business. Being a graphic designer, this is a typical request but, her kind of business surprised me. It was going to be called “Premiere Scrapbook Events”. Scrapbooking is huge now, but at that time I thought, “there are enough people who scrapbook that they get together and have events??”. Apparently there were, because she would hold these events and people from all over the Midwest would flock to them. Soon, I began to see scrapbooking stores pop up all over town. I discovered that this wasn’t a bunch of old ladies cutting out newspaper clippings of their grandson’s local championship-winning basketball team and pasting them in a photo book. These stores are full of design resources—great paper that would normally be hard to find, and some products that I would usually search for at a hardware or office store. I started using some of this stuff in my designs.

In the same way that I started using the crafty resources for relevant designs, scrapbookers started to use designers’ resources—this resource being the Photoshop brush. Jason, one of the Departika partners, noticed this several years back after posting free brushes on his blog, Designfruit. Not only were graphic designers using them to enhance their designs, scrapbookers were using them to decorate their photos, and requesting to use them on products for resale geared towards other crafty-types. Once again, I was amazed by the popularity of scrapbooking, and the amount of people out there who were looking for, and willing to buy these design resources.

I could go on and on about this subject—all the different facets of scrapbooking, how we have tapped into this market, the evolution of scrapbooking and the tools they use—but I won’t, because this would become an incredibly long post. Perhaps that is why Jessica Helfand wrote a book about the subject.