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Becky Higgins joins us to discuss the digital version of Project Life, how we are using it (or aren’t), what people are doing with it, why Project Life went digital, and what’s next.
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Joining the Discussion
Becky Higgins
Steph
Katie Nelson
Peppermint Granberg
Links from the discussion:
Steph’s post on how she uses Project Life
Katie’s post on her December Daily using Project Life
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Picks of The Week:
Peppermint: Day One (mac ipad iphone)
Becky: Lytro.com
Katie: join.me (screenshare)
Steph: iBooks Author App for Macs
According to wikipedia, Lytro makes low resolution jpgs, 1.2 megapixel.
Maybe not as mind blowing as lytro, but have you seen the cinemagraphs on FromMe to You fashion? http://fromme-toyou.tumblr.com/
Re: the delete key, I don’t use my camera delete because I don’t want to use up the battery! I learned that while on vacation. When I import, I immediately do a delete on the computer. I leave photos on my camera and periodically clean up the disk (from my computer).
Loved hearing Becky’s story. Thank you!
I have found a good Android (or web based) alternative to DayOne. It is called 280daily. It is also a micro journal (280 characters per entry). You can attach a photo. You can also set it to remind you. It is web based, so you don’t need a smart phone or a particular OS. You only need web access. This is what I use on my android phone!
I enjoyed hearing Becky’s story. You must pull a lot of weight Steph. At the time she went with Ziblio a few of us were begging her on her blog to release the designs as “digi” as we know it — but nope. I still use her freebies for my own 365/project life. I’m so glad to see other designers creating products to use with her system. I wish Peppermint would’ve asked her how she feels about that
Actually, I think she touched on that very briefly when talking about her creative team? I remember her saying how some people create their album using none of the core products at all – but she didn’t really expand on how that makes her feel as a businesswoman, did she?
Although I can’t speak to how Becky feels about the explosion of products around the Project Life brand, I can tell you that Steph did ask for her blessing on the actions she and I created together and Becky gave it to us.
I think in some respect, there’s a supply and demand element. Digi scrappers (especially) want more, more, more, choices, choices, choices and want it now, now, now! And, the market is so big and so wide with so many styles and aesthetics and preferences that no one designer/artist/person is likely to be able to fulfill the demand.
Thanks Becky (and The Digi Show) for the wonderful interview. It was a fascinating show and I really enjoyed listening to the history behind Project Life.
I found this in regards to printing Lytro images.
http://support.lytro.com/entries/20558086-what-options-do-i-have-for-printing-my-living-pictures
Wanted to say that I really enjoyed listening to Becky Higgin’s story. It was interesting and inspiring.
I wanted to say that I am one of those people who can’t bare to delete any photos from their computer– I’m a photo hoarder. Just the other day, I was reorganizing the hard copies of our pictures. It was fun looking at some of the old pictures… a family event.
I have photo albums, but the photos that did not make the cut remain. I have three boxes full of school portraits and regular photos. A couple times a year (when a photo printer has a print a million pictures for a penny sale), I will print a large batch of photos to add to the box or to an album, but I don’t delete the digi copy still. I either have a CD made or put them on a flash drive. Part of that comes from losing all my son’s baby pictures years ago when the computer they were on crashed at the time. Losing those pictures was devastating, especially since I was in the process of scrapping his baby book and had not had them all printed or saved somewhere else.
My mother is and was a photo hoarder, too– sure, we had family photo albums, but the bulk of our family photos when I was growing up were stored in those cardboard pencil boxes. As a little girl, I didn’t like going through the albums of perfect pictures as much as liked going through the masses of photo out-takes, if you will. Those photos told me the story of our family… especially before I was born (I’m the youngest by 10 years, so a lot of living happened before me). I remember bringing photos to my parents and asking them to explain to me the who, what, when and where of picture in question.
I think those stories really started my path to scrapbooking. When I was 11, I got a hand-me-down-camera and started an album, not just full of pictures, but keep sakes, too. Without that box of photos my mom kept, I’m not sure I’d be so interested in the stories. I’d like to give my kids the same option to pick what’s meaningful, what photos they think tells their story, or at least that’s what I’m telling myself. Maybe one of them will grow up to be memory keepers, too.
Just loved today’s show—such a full circle story! I loved Becky’s sketches in CK and have her books too. The biggest challenge for me in paper scrapping was deciding on placement, so her sketches were the blueprints I needed. I think she started templates without knowing it!
Templates were the #1 reason (among 100s) that I’ve gone mostly digi now. Project Life is such a success because it gave paper scrappers their own template! I did Project Life in 2010 (confession: I still have the last 6 wks to print!), and ran with Katie’s idea to use PL for an Advent album. I too wish you had asked Becky’s thoughts on the explosion of digi product for PL. I for one am enjoying the great freebies and journaling cards. As Katie pointed out, Becky created it to simplify memory-keeping but amazing artist like Lisa Truesdell & Ali E. have inspired others with how creative you can get. Limits can bring out the art. I bought the Clementine line at Jessica Sprague but I’ll be doing a hybrid version this year.
Thank you, Stephanie, for asking about the school line! My oldest is in 4th grade and has Becky’s School of Life kit (from CK), but his younger brothers don’t have anything yet because I keep waiting. Can’t wait to see the video/post Becky mentioned, and the PL for childhood products even more!
I think you should have her back on the show in August to kick off the release…and with me as “pedestrian” guest too:)
Here’s a suggestion for adding lots of photos to your album without taking up page after page: I make little tiny photobooks (about 3.75 by 2.75 inches) to share my photos with others in a convenient, carry-around format. You can get them printed at Wal-Mart, My Publisher, and lots of other places. For example, my niece brought her special guy to meet us and I sent a little book of photos to her, him, and each of their mothers. From now on, my copies of these albums will live in my Project Life album! It’s fun to have something to pull out of the page pocket to look through, too.
Loved hearing Becky tell her story on the show. One of my first memories of scrapbooking is sitting in a playpen with my baby in 2003 tracing letters from Becky’s Creative Lettering book for titles for my early layouts. I just had to pull out my album to see what pages I’d done with Becky’s pretty letters – there they were – baby’s first Christmas, first snow, in the pool with Daddy and chickenpox! All the highlights of my son’s first year. Thanks so much for jogging those memories
Cool episode guys:) i can totally understand where everyone is coming from.
right now i am doing project life in a 12×12 binder. i am also doing regular pages that will go into a photobook. it is a constant battle to keep all my books balanced since i have pretty much run out of space in my house. i have purged my paper supplies to a bare minimum and am always condensing things in an attempt to keep things from overflowing.
project life is great because i am now shrinking my pages to 4×4 and 6×6 and they fit really nicely. does anyone else struggle with space as much as i do?
Another great show! It was great to listen to Becky and hear about how she got started in the industry and how Project Life came about. I’m not really tuned in to the paper scrapping world, but it’s been cool to see it grow and blossom in the digi community. I’m trying my hand at it – just started the beginning of this year – and I’m loving it.
I also have a question unrelated to this show. I’m wondering about the designs of designers who retire. Recently I saw that Biograffiti at Oscraps retired and is offering a chance to buy her store for $25. In the description of the product she says, “After careful consideration and discussion we’ve decided that closing my store and taking my products off the shelf is not going to benefit anyone. So, the store is staying open as-is and, the buy-my-store sale will remain (for now).” That got me thinking, why don’t other designers do that? I’ve been disappointed over the years seeing designers close up shop and not being able to purchase their stuff anymore. I can’t always buy everything the minute it comes out, but I would have liked to still have access to some of it at a later date. Just because the designer isn’t producing new product anymore, doesn’t mean the old product is any less valuable, is it? Wouldn’t it behoove both store owners and the designer (and the customer) to at least keep it available?
Discuss.
The market is very competitive, so in general, store owners want designers who are active in their communities, creating new product and contributing regularly to the site (through collabs, blogs, forums, etc). So, when a designer decides they don’t have the time to commit to the business anymore, there are few store owners who are willing to hold open a spot for a designer who’s not able to contribute in those ways. I’ve seen some designers open their own stores so they can continue to sell older product, but that still requires a level of customer service to maintain it. Hope this helps.
Another Awesome show! (snot just because my comment was read on the show – I think I was on cloud nine for the rest of the week (even my kids got away with murder the day I heard it!) – Katie, thank you so much for the kind words.
I loved hearing Becky’s story too – she is an amazing woman!
It was nice to hear how everyone is doing (or not doing) Project Life this year, I was curious how to incorporate the digi templates. Peppermint I am always jealous how you can say no to things and just do what makes your heart sing (or pays the mortgage). You always make me chuckle.
Well, new month – can’t wait to go see what goodies the daily digi sent me!
You guys made me laugh when your talking about running. Its your show that makes my running possible. If I have to run without a show to listen I’m in trouble!
Also when Becky was talking about how she met the mother of the Lisa B I got goose bumps. Certain things in life happen because they are meant to and this was clearly one of them. When I was a paper scrapper Becky was my first love with her sketch books. I still have them. Couldn’t give them away and plan to turn my favorites into templates.
I didn’t know you are in Seattle Steph so when I saw the title “The Big Storm” I thought there was a big fight in the podcast. I listened for clues to the disagreement for a long time until I realized you meant a real storm! Sometimes I’m too literal and sometimes not literal enough.
Loved listening to Becky’s story on this show.
I just wanted to leave a comment about an iPhone app that I use for daily memory keeping. It’s called Wonderful Days. It lets you add diary entries and you can add photos to your entries, both either with the camera or from the photo library. I original brought this because it has this option to add the weather and you mood for the day and I thought this was cute. But I don’t use, I actually don’t like that. What I love about this is the simplicity of it and it syncs to Evernote. This is important for me as I consider this to be the backup. Also with the sync to Evernote I can easily pick up those stories and use them for journalling without retyping them. It also has great searching of entries so it’s easy to find stories. I know you might be saying “why don’t you just enter it straight in to Evernote?” I love Evernote but it’s pretty uninteresting and this app does one thing and does it well.
I have also tried Momento, which is a great app, I love the look of this app. This app has the ability to tag entries and this is one of the reason I brought it but after using it for a little bit the tagging was just extra work. Also Momento only has a manual backup system. You have to create a backup and then transfer that via iTunes to you PC. That is just way to many steps for me. One thing I like about Momento is that you can do lots of entries during the day and they will all appear under the one date. This was great for when I did week in the life and I will use it again for that as Wonderful Life displays all the daily entries separately and that just how I like to view it.
I’m so far behind that I haven’t been commenting, but I wanted to chime in on this episode. I’m surprised there are so few comments on a show all about Project Life! Especially when the Lytro camera was a pick of the week.
First, one of the other podcasts that I listen to is This Week in Photo (TWiP) and they have been discussing Lytro off and on for the last few months. Episode #237, Bourne to Be Wild, had an interesting (and technical) discussion about it: http://www.thisweekinphoto.com/2012/twip-237-bourne-to-be-wild/
Second, my impression of Project Life has been turned on its head! I never really noticed Project Life until I started listening to The Digi Show — I always thought of it as just another Photo-a-Day type project — a photography exercise for building technical and creative skills, rather than a memory keeping one.
After hearing an overview of Project Life last year, I dismissed it as a cool concept, but not for me, since I am less about scrapbooking *memories* and more about scrapbooking *transitions*.
However, hearing that the cards and pockets are not intended to be fully embellished mini-layouts has made me reconsider my original impression. While I don’t think I’ll use it to replace my “regular” scrapbooking, the thought of using this system to put together fast and easy digital brag books for grandparents *now* and having ready-to-use future tag and journal embellishments for full 12 x 12 [digital or paper] pages *later*!
(I am looking at the Cobalt and Original Edition papers, elements, and cards and I am excited for the possibilities!)
Thanks so much for having Becky on to explain the history and the intent of this system — I don’t think I would have ever come to this realization without having heard it all from her. And thanks to Steph for being so persistant and enthusiastic that there are now official digital Project Life supplies, since I wouldn’t even be considering these kits if there wasn’t a digital option.