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Layout Challenge: Children's Books as Inspiration

by Elizabeth Dillow | 11 years ago

Conceptual inspiration is all about learning how to think on more than one level. When something you see or hear or think about reminds you of something else or triggers a memory or a connection, you have valuable inspiration in your possession.

When you observe, brainstorm, and translate ideas from ordinary and extraordinary objects, you’ve also achieved conceptual inspiration. Like color or design inspiration, conceptual inspiration can send you running to your scrapbook area with a passion to scrapbook. Obviously, there are limitless sources for conceptual inspiration—here is one of my favorite.

Challenge: Create a layout inspired by a beloved children's book

Books are the most trusted repositories for ideas, so it only makes sense that they’re a surefire source of inspiration for your scrapbooking! I absolutely love the children’s book titled,

17 Things I’m Not Allowed To Do Anymore

by Jenny Offill and illustrated by Nancy Carpenter

The book tells the story of a little girl who is undeterred by what one should do and instead, tries things out like stapling her brother’s hair to his pillow or walking backwards to school. While my Grace has never attempted the vast majority of the seventeen things, the minute I read the book my brain began collecting all the things she has done—things that didn’t seem quite as funny in the heat of the moment, but that we laugh about now. 

For this page, I imitated the original idea of the forbidden behavior list and borrowed a little from the book’s design to create something that made us giggle.

Give me a stack of books (for children or grownups, it matters not) and I can give you a list of page ideas they inspired me to create.

I guarantee that you’ll be able to do this too; at first it feels deliberate, looking for the idea you can run with, but after a while it will become second-nature. You may have already picked up a few children’s books looking for color or design inspiration, so don’t forget to think about them in terms of conceptual inspiration, too!

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