Design Choices

For those of us who make CAS cards, placement is HUGELY important.

I mean, Titanic huge.

If you get one tiny little bit of your design placed incorrectly, it sinks the whole design.

Today's cards illustrate the impact of placement on design choices...where an eighth inch can affect balance so much you have to make adjustments to salvage the card.

Our first card is a sweet and simple card made with Autumn Adornments from Papertrey.

The branch of leaves and berries is perfectly curved to drape one corner of the card while the linear sentiment provides a nice contrast. Lines love curves. Also, the balance is good...especially because the berries are embellished with a Smooch that almost exactly matches the Hero Arts rust ink of the sentiment.

But what I want you to notice is that the branch ends midway down the sentiment. In other words, the blessings portion of the sentiment is below the end of the branch. If it were even with the branch, it would look very odd indeed. That eighth-inch drop in the sentiment on the above card makes an enormous difference to the success of the design.

When I made another card with the branch placed in the corner, I wasn't paying close attention to placement. The sentiment and the end of the branch stopped at the same imaginary horizontal line on the card...and it was ugly! Unfortunately, I didn't shoot a picture before I fixed the problem, but if you look at the fixed card below and imagine the bottom branch not there, you might see what I mean.

If you have a really good imagination, that is.

The fix in this case was rather simple...completing the border on the side of the card broke up the imaginary horizontal line and gave the whole card a more appropriate and organic feel. Instead of Smooch, I used paprika Stickles, which gives a nice bit of glittery sparkle to the card, and the single acorn accenting the sentiment unifies the two halves of the design.

And that's all I have to say about that.

Supplies
stamps: Papertrey Autumn Adornments, Clearly Besotted (Happy sentiment set)
ink: Hero Arts butter bar, rust, pumpkin pie; Memento cocoa
paper: Papertrey
accessories: Smooch, Stickles