angore
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Post by angore on Dec 18, 2023 10:58:45 GMT
philatelia My comment was about just centering everything on the page (no accomodation for hole punching). This means more space on a page but then would need protective sleeves so you could put them in a binder. You can put single sided pages back to back. Yes, creating pages that you actively collect (adding or updates) makes it a hassle. I am just adding possible options.
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Andy Pastuszak
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Post by Andy Pastuszak on Dec 18, 2023 13:38:41 GMT
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Post by classicalstamps on Dec 18, 2023 18:23:33 GMT
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Andy Pastuszak
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Post by Andy Pastuszak on Dec 18, 2023 20:06:24 GMT
Ok, one last take.
I stretched the text boxes to the margins of the page. I did this, because for some pages, I need a little more space to fit in all the descriptions.
Opinions?
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youpiao
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Post by youpiao on Dec 18, 2023 20:19:36 GMT
I'm not a fan of single-column text that is so wide. Could the text be put into two columns under each title?
(Also Tiffany Lamp has a typo: it says "camed glass shade."
TTSC
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Andy Pastuszak
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Post by Andy Pastuszak on Dec 18, 2023 20:25:44 GMT
And Name and Date on the same line
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Andy Pastuszak
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Post by Andy Pastuszak on Dec 18, 2023 20:33:26 GMT
I'm not a fan of single-column text that is so wide. Could the text be put into two columns under each title? (Also Tiffany Lamp has a typo: it says "camed glass shade." TTSC That's directly pulled out of Wikipedia.
I just did 2 columns and it looks worse than the single column layout.
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Post by clivel on Dec 19, 2023 0:55:54 GMT
I'm not a fan of single-column text that is so wide. Could the text be put into two columns under each title? TTSC I just did 2 columns and it looks worse than the single column layout.
I agree with youpiao, about wide single-column text, it looks ungainly and is also difficult to read.
I have put together a quick example illustrating two different two-column layouts. I prefer the top layout with the paragraphs in columns to the bottom layout which has each paragraph spread over two columns:
Clive
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Andy Pastuszak
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Post by Andy Pastuszak on Dec 19, 2023 2:30:12 GMT
The only way 2 colums comes close to acceptable if I rearrange the descriptions so they line up like this:
I REALLY don't like that the descriptions are not in release order. But if I do them in release order, I get this disaster:
Having uneven columns in the first picture really bothers me also. I also need to worry about widows and orphans.
I also need to think about how much time this will take to create and maintain.
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Andy Pastuszak
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Post by Andy Pastuszak on Dec 19, 2023 2:37:56 GMT
And here is the whole thing in a Serif font:
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Andy Pastuszak
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Post by Andy Pastuszak on Dec 19, 2023 2:58:20 GMT
Does this look acceptable?
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djcmh
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Post by djcmh on Dec 19, 2023 5:42:38 GMT
Not a fan of the 2_column setup, would stick with the single column format, then you can keep chronological order for the text descriptions
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angore
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Post by angore on Dec 19, 2023 11:32:21 GMT
It seems to be common to do single column but intentionally leave a lot of white space on a page.
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Andy Pastuszak
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Post by Andy Pastuszak on Dec 19, 2023 13:31:28 GMT
It seems to be common to do single column but intentionally leave a lot of white space on a page.
That's what I was doing. The problem is, I am going to run into issues on some pages where I won't be able to fit all the descriptions. I'll put up an example later this morning.
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Andy Pastuszak
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Post by Andy Pastuszak on Dec 19, 2023 15:24:27 GMT
To get pages 7 and 8 to fit the descriptions, I needed to dump the date. Here is what it looks like now.
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philatelia
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Post by philatelia on Dec 19, 2023 16:54:59 GMT
I’m in awe of you folks who put so much heart and soul and artistry into designing exhibits, album pages and other ways of mounting and displaying your philatelic treasures. Jeff’s JeffS orange thematic pages are especially delightful, thestampforum.boards.net/post/181725/thread. thestampforum.boards.net/post/176878/thread and blaamand ‘s illustrated Scandinavian pages are simply stunning. thestampforum.boards.net/post/144659/threadMe? 😂 I’m proud of myself if I simply center the stamps on the Hagnar sheets and I don’t even seem to have enough patience to do that - I keep adding new copies, cancels etc. and rearranging so that they are never “done.” How you find the time to create these works of art is mind boggling to me. Sometimes I buy collections on similarly created pages and it almost feels sacrilegious to disassemble them and put them in my blah, unadorned stock sheets. Oh well - ya can’t do it all!
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Andy Pastuszak
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Post by Andy Pastuszak on Dec 19, 2023 18:14:47 GMT
I want a stamp album. Something about every commercial offering bothers me. So, I take the bull by the horns and did my own pages. I've always enjoyed graphic arts. So, it's fun to do.
My biggest problem is that I am always seeing new fonts I want to try, and new types of paper to play with. I used to spend forever laying out these pages by hand. Then @posmastergs made his tool for Scribus, and that made my life a LOT easier.
My biggest problem now is that I am impatient. Someone presents an idea to me that looks good, and the first thing I think is "Wow, that's gonna take a lot of time." I look at companies like Mystic Stamp and their Heirloom album that came out sometime in the 2000s and I wonder how many people worked on that album and for how long to get all the descriptions in, and measured all the boxes for every US stamp from 1847 to present. I guess if it's your full time job, and you've decided on the style guide, you just crank through them. If you do it for 8 hours a day, I guess you can make an entire album in a reasonable amount of time. But with companies like Scott and Harris. They've been making albums since God knows when. So all they need to do is add supplements to their previous work.
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Post by clivel on Dec 19, 2023 22:48:37 GMT
My biggest problem now is that I am impatient. Someone presents an idea to me that looks good, and the first thing I think is "Wow, that's gonna take a lot of time." I look at companies like Mystic Stamp and their Heirloom album that came out sometime in the 2000s and I wonder how many people worked on that album and for how long to get all the descriptions in, and measured all the boxes for every US stamp from 1847 to present. I guess if it's your full time job, and you've decided on the style guide, you just crank through them. If you do it for 8 hours a day, I guess you can make an entire album in a reasonable amount of time. But with companies like Scott and Harris. They've been making albums since God knows when. So all they need to do is add supplements to their previous work.
Actually, once having decided on a layout and sticking to it, making an album can be surprisingly fast, for example the almost 250 albums that can be downloaded from here Free PDF stamp album pages have mostly been made by people with very little experience, and often in very little time. I have had people send me albums of over a hundred pages that they have created in only a few days.
From my experience, the most time consuming part of creating an album is finding and downloading the images to place in stamp boxes. But, even though album pages with images can look very nice, given that the intention is to eventually cover these up, I personally rarely spend the time to add images to my own albums.
Clive
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Andy Pastuszak
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Post by Andy Pastuszak on Dec 20, 2023 3:21:19 GMT
My biggest problem now is that I am impatient. Someone presents an idea to me that looks good, and the first thing I think is "Wow, that's gonna take a lot of time." I look at companies like Mystic Stamp and their Heirloom album that came out sometime in the 2000s and I wonder how many people worked on that album and for how long to get all the descriptions in, and measured all the boxes for every US stamp from 1847 to present. I guess if it's your full time job, and you've decided on the style guide, you just crank through them. If you do it for 8 hours a day, I guess you can make an entire album in a reasonable amount of time. But with companies like Scott and Harris. They've been making albums since God knows when. So all they need to do is add supplements to their previous work.
Actually, once having decided on a layout and sticking to it, making an album can be surprisingly fast, for example the almost 250 albums that can be downloaded from here Free PDF stamp album pages have mostly been made by people with very little experience, and often in very little time. I have had people send me albums of over a hundred pages that they have created in only a few days.
From my experience, the most time consuming part of creating an album is finding and downloading the images to place in stamp boxes. But, even though album pages with images can look very nice, given that the intention is to eventually cover these up, I personally rarely spend the time to add images to my own albums.
Clive
The longest part for me is the descriptions. I can get images very quickly from various online sources. I've spent a couple of hours a night for over a week researching descriptions for Ukrainian stamps. A lot of times, I can find some of the more obscure stuff in Ukrainian Wikipedia. Though I am fluent in Ukrainian, I am fluent in 1930s Western Ukrainian, which is what my parents spoke when they left Ukraine. It's now 90 years later. A lot of things have changed. Though I can read the words on the page just fine, a lot of times I just don't know what some of the nouns are and have to resort to using Google Translate to fill in the parts of knowledge I am missing. Sometimes I just can't find information on a Ukrainian stamp anywhere and I have to reach out to people IN Ukraine to tell me.
US stamps are somewhat easier. I can get descriptions from the US Postal Bulletin, or from the USPS website. But getting those set up on pages and making them fit can be a challenge. Then you have the widow and orphan cleanup that you have to do by hand.
Maybe I'm just a nutjob perfectionist, but, if anything is off, it bugs the **** out of me.
Something else that's annoying is that I want my pages to be in release date order. For the US, this works out most of the time. But Ukraine will happily release a souvenir sheet, a commemorative stamp and then another souvenir sheet. So, then I go hack pages together and I have one page with a souvenir sheet, one page with ONE STAMP ON IT, and another page with a souvenir sheet. Then I need to decide what's more important, release order number, or making the pages look nice.
Most of my pages have stamp images because PostmasterGS Scribus tool lets me add images with almost no effort, once I have the images. But for US stamps, I really don't need them. And I am probably going to remove them, just to save on toner/ink.
So, for me, descriptions are a huge time suck.
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madbaker
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Post by madbaker on Dec 20, 2023 5:47:31 GMT
The longest part for me is the descriptions. I hear you. Me too.
This might be a benefit of adopting the 'left page' approach, because if you learn more information, or refine what you want to share about the stamp, you can reprint a 'left page' without remounting any stamps.
I'm a little like you in that if there's a stamp issue that intrigues me, I'll spend an evening on Wikipedia digging into the history, etc. That's a lot of fun. But I know I can't capture all of what I learn, so I record a sentence or two and move on.
But because I put my descriptions under the stamps, I have to live with what I record in the moment.
----
PS that's longer than the post.
That's the charm, appeal and value of stamp collections, however -- they are personal. At least that's the value to me.
Take that Frank Sinatra stamp, or the Tiffany lamp stamp, as examples.
On their own, in a mixture, big deal. Yes, a valid stamp. Worth at most a dollar used and face value mint. Won't ever be worth more than that, etc.
Put it in a commercial album and it fills a space. OK, neat, especially when the page is full, but I've seen folks flipping through modern US (or any country) albums that are nearly complete and I lose interest fairly quickly.
Put it in a home-made album with descriptions from the postal service and we're getting somewhere. At least you are deciding what to include in terms of stamps, write up, layout, etc. The collection is starting to reflect the collector.
Add your own writeups, or your own summaries of writeups, and now we're really cooking. What you include, choose to exclude, etc. speaks volumes. It's no longer a collection of US stamps, it's Andy's collection of US stamps.
What you find interesting about Frank Sinatra or Tiffany lamps (or the stamps, the designers, the postal rates, etc etc.) is far more interesting than what the USPS marketing department thinks, even if you're copying some of their text. At least you are deciding what to copy!
That's the reason that even though, as Clive mentioned, there are heaps of homemade album pages on his site, I use them for inspiration only. Same with the DIY area here. I can't get enough inspiration from others and how all your design choices make a uniquely 'you' collection. But in the end I'm gonna do it....myyyyy waaayyy! (sorry, can't help myself!)
And I'm glad you do it your way too.
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Post by clivel on Dec 20, 2023 7:21:46 GMT
Most of my pages have stamp images because PostmasterGS Scribus tool lets me add images with almost no effort, once I have the images. But for US stamps, I really don't need them. And I am probably going to remove them, just to save on toner/ink. As with AlbumEasy, all it is is is a matter of including the image name. Centring, padding and even optional grey scale conversion are all handled automatically by the program.
It is the finding and downloading of the images that I find time consuming irrespective of which program is being used to generate the album.
Clive
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youpiao
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Post by youpiao on Dec 20, 2023 16:40:38 GMT
Andy, I'm thinking that on the Scientists and Journalists writeups, the 1st paragraph of each is not necessary, as each individual writeup will contain that information. Also, if you reword some of the bios, you can say the same thing with fewer words without affecting the content (notice, my bio takes up 6 lines of text vs 7), and you could format the individual bios in the same way as the individual stamp descriptions in the left-hand column, maintaining a uniform look to the page. So Gerti Cori would look like this .
Gerti Cori – Biochemist (1896-1957)
Gerti Cori, in collaboration with husband Carl, made important discoveries, including a new derivative of glucose, that elucidated the steps of carbohydrate metabolism and helped in the understanding and treatment of diabetes and other metabolic diseases. The couple were awarded a half- share of the 1947 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
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youpiao
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Post by youpiao on Dec 20, 2023 16:54:31 GMT
Another example, which reduces a 6-line description to 4, without eliminating any information.
John Hersey (1914-1993)
John Hersey was a versatile writer. Acclaimed as the greatest work of journalism of the 20th century, “Hiroshima,” his most famous work, describes what happened when the US dropped an atomic bomb on that Japanese city.
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Andy Pastuszak
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Post by Andy Pastuszak on Dec 20, 2023 20:41:25 GMT
You are my new copywriter, youpiao!
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youpiao
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Post by youpiao on Dec 20, 2023 21:38:04 GMT
madbaker: "This might be a benefit of adopting the 'left page' approach, because if you learn more information, or refine what you want to share about the stamp, you can reprint a 'left page' without remounting any stamps." Not really. The left page is the reverse side of a right-hand page with stamps mounted on it.
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madbaker
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Post by madbaker on Dec 20, 2023 23:23:27 GMT
madbaker : "This might be a benefit of adopting the 'left page' approach, because if you learn more information, or refine what you want to share about the stamp, you can reprint a 'left page' without remounting any stamps." Not really. The left page is the reverse side of a right-hand page with stamps mounted on it. Ah, that would break my brain. I'd be printing an extra sheet, and possibly put them back to back in a sheet protector.
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Andy Pastuszak
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Post by Andy Pastuszak on Dec 21, 2023 14:51:34 GMT
I think at this point, 2 columns is out.
But the beauty of my work is that I release the "source code" (my Scribus files) and you can do whatever you want with them. So, you're free to make a 2 column layout and use it.
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angore
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Post by angore on Dec 22, 2023 13:12:56 GMT
I revised and created pages for my Mystic album so when I inserted a new page between existing ones I usually redid the before page to put the correct verbage on the left hand side. I scanned the image or put my own and then scanned the text to OCR to recreate the left to match the right.
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DrewM
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Post by DrewM on Jan 29, 2024 23:32:53 GMT
This illustrates the accuracy of the saying "too many cooks spoils the broth". Having too many collectors wanting these pages to conform with their version of what an album should look like is not likely to work since they all want something different. I don't put any of my stamps inside plastic envelopes (whatever you call them) or on Vario pages, and these page layouts really have nothing whatsoever to do with those kinds of pages which are "regular" album pages -- on paper -- the old-fashioned way where stamps are mounted with or without mounts inside boxes designed for them.
I like these pages very much, Andy, but as you've added suggestions I think they've become worse. I don't mean all the suggestions are bad ones, but taken altogether the pages have grown too busy and overcomplicated. Compared to the initial images, these later pages are not as appealing -- to me, anyway. Here are my thoughts.
I like the descriptions on the back of the preceding page. It keeps the stamp page nicely uncluttured. And you should also keep the description page as uncluttered as possible so as not to make it the main focus. The main focus of a stamp album should be the stamps.
I'm not bothered by the identifiers and the issue dates being repeated on each page, but I wouldn't mind if the issue dates were removed from the description page since they serves no real purpose there. But either way is fine.
On the left-hand description pages, the line both above and below the descriptions tends to emphasize them too much for my taste. Since the purpose of a stamp album is to display stamps, the descriptions should be subtle rather than emphasized. After all, some albums over-emphasize the stamp descriptions by putting them on the stamp page itself -- and you're trying not to do that because it detracts from the stamps. The stamps are what you want emphasized. Thus the boxes around each stamp. So I'd leave off these lines. That leaves the descriptions available to read if you need to read them, but does not attract your eye unnecessarily. Your eye should be drawn to the stamps on the right page. You're not reading a book. And I and many collectors don't need those descriptions since we know what the stamps were issued for -- so we aren't even going to read them. We're going to look at the stamps. I'd play the descriptions down and remove the lines.
I'd also not add just one line between each description, not two. Spreading the stamp descriptions out makes them too prominent when this is about looking at stamps, not reading things. If you're designing a "junior album" for kids, then descriptions matter a lot. But that's not what this is.
On the description pages, I would not add the UNITED STATES 2008 heading. It's already on the stamp page. Adding it, makes the description page into a MAIN page which you have to look at -- which is what the stamp pages are supposed to be. The description page is supposed to be a page that says, "By the way, if you don't know that these stamps were issued for, let me tell you . . . ". A stamp album is not like reading a book -- it's for displaying stamps. Descriptions are "extra". Adding a heading changes the album from a stamp album into some kind of history book. Leave the heading off the back of the pages.
Where you feel you must list varieties of stamps on a description page, I'd be very minimal. Especially if the variety is abbreviated on the stamp page already -- like "9.5 die cut (4232-35)." For varieties, I'd adopt certain protocols: a) Multiple catalogue numbers written as "4232-35," not as "4232-4235" -- which is redundant and takes up unnecessary space. Where the initial number changes on the final stamp, you do have to include the new number: "4299-5003," not "4299-03" since that makes no sense. b) Where more than one stamp is the same type such as "self-adhesive" or "coil," list that only once as a heading, not over and over for each stamp:
Self-Adhesive Coils Die cut 9.5 (4332-35) Die cut 11 (4236-39) Die cut 8.5 (4240-43)
I'd even try to omit "die cut" for each one since they're all die cut. Less is better. Repetition is too much.
I like these pages a lot and I'd like to see them simple, uncluttered, and not so fussy as they may be turning into. In my albums, I only use large-size album pages, never printer-size paper, but these could be printed nicely on various sizes of album paper including blank (perhaps all-blank) Scott Speciality size paper or Lighthouse paper or others, and they'd look very good. Very impressive job! Now don't "overdo" things too much! You know what they say about designers: KISS (Keep It Simple, Stamp-page designer!)
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