Who of us digi-scrappers doesn’t aspire to make our scrapbook pages look as realistic as possible? Well, I found a great tool to give your page a fun slant that is a wee bit different than our typical scrapbook layouts. I’m talking about the Magazine Stand templates by Amanda Taylor (taylormade designs at Oscraps). She has two volumes out that are super-easy to work with, and yet highly editable, which means you can pretty much use them any way you want.

Magazine Stand Vol. 1

by taylormade designs

Click on the image to get to this template in Amanda's store.

True, those of you who digiscrap in order to print an album, probably won’t find much use in these templates. But if you simply are looking for a fun way to document your memories, and make them stand out in the galleries, too, these templates might be just what you are looking for.

They come in two versions. One layered template that includes frames and guides (though you have to create your own textpaths), the other version is just a blank page template, which means you can embellish it however you want. You can clip papers to the backgrounds, you can add photos and embellishments all to your own pleasing. You can use Amanda’s guides, or you can decide you want to do your own thing entirely. Shadows come on their own layers, so if you are someone like me who prefers a slightly unusual shadow angle, you can still work with this template, by simply deleting the shadow layers and adding your own shadow styles.

Here’s my own page I created using Amanda’s templates & Creashen’s “Newport” kit.

Magazine Stand Vol. 1 by taylormade designs

For this page, I took Amanda’s template, resized the photo frame in the top left corner to fit my photo, adjusted the shadow layering Amanda had added (all very simple steps that are easily done), and then I added a few elements, the title and journaling and there was my page – like right out of a magazine. It promptly made the Gallery Standouts blog, too.

For a different look, try flipping the whole page, or if you play around with the seam (doubling it, flipping one of them horizontally and arranging them side by side, and cutting off the overlapping parts), you can even position it anywhere else on the page, making it appear like a double page, etc. The possibilities seem endless.

Anyways, I hope I was able to inspire you a bit and maybe I’ll start seeing more of those magazine pages in the galleries soon …