Binder Covers

Quick Backstory:

I've seen so many cute, preppy binder covers online, but all of their creators are stingy with the designs. I wanted to make a quick tutorial on how to make them with Picasa so that everyone can have trendy binders!

Step one:

Find yourself a dandy picture that you like. Make sure that it's roughly smaller than 600x862 pixels so that it's the size of a standard piece of printer paper. If you need it to be a different size, I use this website to do my conversions. 

Step two:

Open Picasa and use the crop tool to crop off the top half of your picture. Save the cropped picture as a copy (file>save as copy), then un-do the crop on your original picture.

Step three:

Repeat step two with the bottom half of your picture.

Step four:

Create a collage with your two cropped pictures leaving your desired amount of room between the two pictures for your label.

I put my picture with the text already there in this screen shot, so that you have an idea of what I'm getting at.

Step four:

Save your collage and insert your text into the space you left for your label. Again, my collage already had the text in there so that you would have an idea of what you're heading towards.

I suggest playing around with fonts until you find one that's appropriate for your picture

Helpful tips:

Don't print this on a plain piece of paper, go buy photo paper or have it professionally printed; otherwise it looks terrible.

Make sure that your image is square with your paper, you don't want a woppy-jawed picture!

Try adding circles or other images in the middle of plainer prints to put your monogram inside for a preppier twist on an otherwise boring journal or binder

Finished products:

Here are a few of my binder covers! If the tutorial is too confusing, comment and I'd be happy to make one for you.

Your's Sincerely, 

Emilea.