Designing by twos

Last weekend I finished these two layouts, both using Studio Calico's March kit Into the Woods:

The one I made for my son that I posted about last week, and this one:

A celebration of my husband and me going out for coffee.

Both pages have essentially the same design, two vertical photos side by side and in this case aligned right.. I take more vertical photos than horizontal, mainly because my husband is 6'4" and my sons are short, so to fit them all in the same photo I generally have to go vertical. Now I tend to go vertical automatically.

Design-wise, the easiest way to put two vertical photos on a page untrimmed is side by side. I do that often. Here's some other pages I did in the past year, all of which have slight alterations to make them look different:

I did this one for the Big Idea Festival last summer. Unlike the earlier pages, I lay the photos only partially on the mat. I also used my Coluzzle (remember that?) to cut a home for the circular photo.

These two photos I trimmed and matted. Again I lay it on a mat, adding many punched and stitched layers below, plus journaling and title to the side.


Finally, this layout used a sketch from Sketchy Thursdays last year. The two were still on a mat, but I had a cross of patterned paper and color core cardstock alongside the photos, though the title is still on top and the journaling still to the right.

I mention this basic habit of mine because I think we scrappers tend to punish ourselves for not coming up with new ways to design pages. I can understand that feeling, but sometimes you can do many different, creative things with a basic design.