2012 Project Life, Week 4 (Digital Version)
Ever since I posted about my approach to Project Life in 2012, the question I have been asked most often is how I print on my journaling cards. Do I use the cards that come in the Project Life kit or just print out the digital version of the journaling cards? How do I get the text lined up on the cards?
First of all, I do use the physical cards that come with the Clementine Core Kit to print my journaling, although you definitely could just print out the digital journaling cards on white cardstock and trim them to fit if you wanted to. What I do use the digital journaling cards for is to line up my text and get it ready to print, and I'm going to attempt to show you exactly how I do that.
A quick disclaimer: there are other similar tutorials out there that explain how to print on a Project Life journaling card. Here are a couple you might want to check out:
Paislee Press: How To Print on Journaling Cards
Listgirl: Printing Onto Project Life Journaling Cards
The only thing really unique about what I am going to show you is how I get my journaling to line up with the lined journaling cards that come with Project Life.
Step 1: Create an 8.5x11 document in Photoshop or other similar photo editing software. Within that document, create an outline the same size and shape of a Project Life journaling card. If you zoom in on the photo below, you can see that the actual dimensions I used are 2.875 inches x 3.938 inches. Instead of doing this yourself, you can save time and energy by just downloading the free template from Paislee Press.
Step 2: Print out this document with the outline showing and set it aside. You will use this later when you are ready to print out your card(s).
Step 3: Open up the digital copy of the journaling card you are planning to use and drag it onto your 8.5x11 document. Move it so it is lined up right inside the outline.
Step 4: Create a text box and type in your journaling, obviously making sure it fits within the borders of the card. Since I already completed the journaling in my digital version of Project Life (shown at the top of this post), I just dragged the text from the digital Project Life file into my 8.5x11 document.
Now, the key to getting the text to line up perfectly on the lines is to adjust your line height. To do this you need to go to your Character Menu in Photoshop (to display this menu, go to Window -> Character), shown in the photo below. The place where you will adjust your line height is illustrated by the two letter "A"s on top of one another. I have found that if you set this to 19.4, it will match up with the spacing on *most* of the Project Life journaling cards found in the Clementine kit regardless of your text size. I imagine the spacing is similar for other Project Life editions as well, but if the spacing is different it is easy to figure this out and make adjustments on your own.
Step 5: Now that you have everything lined up and formatted the way you want, you are almost ready to print. But first, make sure you hide the layers that contain your digital journaling card and the outline you created in step 1. All that should be visible is your text, like in the photo below.
Step 6: Attach your journaling card to the 8.5x11 piece of paper you printed out in step 2, fitting the card within the outline. Double sided tape would probably work best for this, but I just use a couple of rolled up pieces of regular tape and it has always worked fine.
Step 7: Print!
Step 8: Carefully remove the journaling card(s) from the paper (you can reuse the 8.5x11 piece of paper again as many times as you want).
And here is my physical version of Week 4, complete with printed journaling cards:
I hope this helps! Now go forth and print...
