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AncestryPress Monthly
   
 

Welcome to AncestryPress Monthly


Our free newsletter is full of ideas and inspiration for sharing your family stories. Each month, you’ll learn what’s new in AncestryPress and get expert advice about how to preserve memories from the past and present.


Highlighting images with frames, masks and corners

By Stefanie Condie

 This month I interviewed Marie McFadden, a very talented graphic designer in our Creative Services group, in the hope that she would give up a few trade secrets. When Marie designs a page in AncestryPress, she seems to achieve a magical balance between elegance and simplicity. Her pages are always visually compelling but never kitschy or cluttered.

After talking to Marie, I realized that many of her tricks of the trade really boil down to a few common sense guidelines. By “common sense” I mean they seem totally obvious after someone with many years of professional training and experience has pointed them out to you.

But the point is that you don’t need to be a pro to make an amazing book in AncestryPress because, first, Marie and her colleagues are busy creating lovely backgrounds for you. Second, our product team has engineered the book-building tool with you, the average person with no design training, in mind. And third, Marie has provided helpful tips for combining all the different elements of your book into a beautiful, harmonious whole.

With that in mind, I’d like to tell you about some new features that will make it easy to amp up the “wow” factor in your AncestryPress projects. Read more

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Design tips for family history books

Q&A with Marie McFadden

 Graphic designer Marie McFadden offers guidelines for creating a book that will make a lasting impression on your family and friends.

Q: If I’m creating an AncestryPress book, how can I use embellishments to enhance a page without overwhelming it or detracting from the family history information?
A: I would say the first thing you want to do is make sure your embellishments match. If you already have a lot of information on your page, you might want to use fewer embellishments. But don’t be afraid to manipulate them so that they enhance the elements you already have on the page and bring them to life. If you have a lot of photos on the page and you don’t have room for a lot of embellishments, you can use embellishments to accent the photo corners. They won’t detract from the photo if they all match and they go with the background.

Don’t be afraid to experiment. Try combining two or three embellishments. You can layer the elements on a page and place an embellishment behind something so that only part of the embellishment is showing. You can use an embellishment by itself on one page and combine it with something else on the opposite page, so that each page has a unique look, and yet the two pages match. Read more


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New in AncestryPress

  • New Backgrounds and Embellishments – We've added dozens of new backgrounds and hundreds of new embellishments.
  • Adding New Pages – We've made it easier to add pages to your book. Just right-click on any page thumbnail and you'll see a menu that lets you add pages from templates or add a blank page. 
  • Borders, Frames and Photo Corners – To explore new options for showcasing your photos, click on the Frames tab. Also be sure to check out the "Borders & Corners" folder under the Other Content tab.


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