How are Pixel Gypsy Products “Born”?
Sometimes a page kit is inspired by a beautiful combination of colors that just speaks a theme to me. Other times a word, a phrase, or a lyric will morph into a complete idea in my head. And there are always those times where the idea will start with a specific event, season or theme.
People sometimes ask me how I go about conceptualizing a kit and it can be a bit difficult to explain my process. It always starts with colors, a word, a specific theme or a feeling that rolls around in my brain—percolating like those old, old coffee pots. In fact, the coffee in a percolator is a great analogy. The idea starts as separate parts (like the coffee beans and water), fragments, impressions and wisps of feeling. They gently roll and bubble around in my brain until they’ve blended together to create a full-bodied concept. When I’ve reached this point, I can usually close my eyes and see the entire kit in my mind—from the paper patterns to all the different embellishments. That’s when I sit down to work.
I know some designer spend weeks on a page kit. I can honestly say that rarely does it take me that long from start to finish (in terms of time at the computer). Once the concept is formed in my mind and I’m ready to get down to work, I find that I work very quickly because I’m simply duplicating what I see in my mind’s eye. Conceptualization is where I spend most of my time on a kit and I’ve learned over the past six years not to rush that part. If I’m impatient during that phase and sit down to work too soon, the product never comes to fruition because I lose my way in the middle of it, or it ends up feeling very disjointed.
What is the Goal of Pixel Gypsy Products?
It’s pretty obvious that the basic goal of my products is always to be a helper for scrappers to get their memories down into a visual record. However, I’ve spent a lot of time the past few months really evaluating how I can improve upon that. My goal in 2012 is to unify my products to better fit the one thing that many scrappers really seem to want—to make memory keeping easy and intuitive. I know that there are scrappers who really enjoy digging into the process of creation, but a lot of scrappers don’t want making beautiful, meaningful layouts to be a laborious, excessively time consuming task. They’d rather spend the bulk of their time making those memories and then quickly record them for future remembrance. The ultimate goal of Pixel Gypsy products is to create products that enable easy, intuitive, meaningful memory keeping.
Share Your Thoughts
Feedback from scrappers is important to me. If you’d like to take a moment to visit my Contact page and let me know your thoughts on where digital scrapbooking products (in general) fall short for you as a scrapper, I will certainly appreciate your time. I know what struggles I have as a scrapper, but it’s great to hear from other scrappers about what they struggle with, as well. This really helps me move my products in the right direction. Making “pretty things” is secondary on my priority list. Making useful things is number one.
