Creating Your Own Journaling and Title Cards

While there are literally thousands of different Project Life cards you can use in an infinite combination for your pages, sometimes there just isn't that "perfect" card you were envisioning for your page.

This has become a little less of a problem with the addition to the app of amazing features like Free Form Text (FFT) and the ability to upload and use your own fonts. And being able to manipulate the text on your cards with these two features has been a total game changer.

But the tip I'm going to share today is more about creating your own title or journaling cards, that feature a background photo that makes up the "edges" of the card. You'll see what I mean if you keep reading. :)

Recently I've been taking photos on my phone of cool textures. Things like a painted concrete wall, bricks on a cobblestone road, piles of leaves, that sort of thing. I wanted to use this as journaling cards on my pages, but didn't like how when I added FFT to them, depending on the font color and size, some of the letters got lost in the dark and light spaces of the background image I was putting them on.

I tried a couple of different font colors, and all of them seem to get lost within the image.
That's the thing I want to try and avoid--the getting lost part.

So, what I'd like to try and do (and I actually did and really liked how it turned out--hence this blog post!) is to put a white text box over this background photo, that I could then type on for my journaling, but still be able to see the cool texture of the photo at the same time.

Well, I don't know how to use Photoshop or any other design software, and I just have my little phone with the Project Life app on it, so I want to make due with that.

I'm going to demo making a journaling card, and then a title card.

So here's how I did it:

First, I pulled in a texture photo into a card slot in the Project Life app. For this demonstration, I'm going to use a picture of Legos from the storage bin we have at our house. And I put it in the largest card slot of the Big Shot 8 template, just so that my screenshots would be nice and big.

Then I tapped the photo and selected the text tool icon so I could add FFT to the image. (This is an add-on feature in the Project Life app, if you haven't purchased it, it's well worth the couple of bucks it costs for this versatility!)

Tap the pen icon to access the FFT ability to add text to your photos.

Once you tap the text tool icon, a small text box appears in the middle of your photo.

Now here is where I'm going to get a little creative. Instead of typing out my journaling, I want to create a "box" for my journaling to go onto. So I type a capital letter "I" using one of the default Project Life app fonts, Raleway. I choose this font because the letter "I" is just a tall, skinny rectangle shape in this font. That's key for making a box. :)

The next step is to rotate that letter "I" horizontally. Tap on the little circle button on the bottom right corner of the text box and rotate it around with your finger until the "I" is on its side. Inevitably when you rotate it, you are also going to be dragging it, making a larger font size. That's totally okay. We're going to need it plenty big! 

Once you've got the letter "I" on its side, tap the little circle button again and drag it to the right to enlarge the font size. You'll have to manually move the whole text box to the left a few times to be able to continue to drag the box even bigger.

Tap, hold and drag that dot button as big as you can within the card slot. Then move the whole text box to the left of the card slot and then tap, hold and drag the box again to continue to increase the size of the "I".

You'll get to a point where your text box is so big, you won't even be able to see the letter "I" anymore, just the little dot button to drag it even bigger. That's okay! You can always slide your finger to the right within the box to see how big the "I" is getting, and then slide it back to get the dot button again.

What you're aiming for, is to create a big enough letter "I", so that you have a nice white area over your photo that you can use to journal on. Using this method, you create white space in the middle of the card slot, with your texture photo showing along the top and bottom edges.

Once you get your white box in place, then you can journal over the top with another FFT box. On your toolbar, tap the plus (+) sign button to create an additional FFT box.

When that new FFT box appears, it will have white selected as the text color by default. So you'll have to manually change the text color to something else to be able to see it.

Now that you have a custom made journal card, add your journaling as you normally would. One thing to remember, is that when you journal using a FFT box, you have to manually put in your hard returns, or else your journaling will just go on in one continual line off the side of the card.

To create more of a "title" type card. I repeated a lot of the same steps as above, but instead of using a capital "I" for the white space, I used an equal sign (=), and even then, just the bottom half of the equal sign.

I created a FFT box and typed in the equal sign, then enlarged it until it was the size I wanted for a title card. Then I positioned the equal sign on the top portion of my card slot, so that only the bottom line of the equal sign was visible, giving me a white box to work with, with lots of the background Legos image still showing.

You might have to experiment with different fonts for your equal sign. Some are really long and skinny, and some are more short and squat. Just depends on what you like. This one is more short and squat, which I liked.

When it's all said and done, you can have a custom made journaling and/or title card that you can use to create a truly one of a kind look to your pages, and that matches your pictures better than an "official" Project Life card could.

Here's a finished page with a Perler Bead custom title and journaling card made using these steps.

Try it out and let me know what you think!