Creating digital collages in Shuffles is subjective. There is no right or wrong way of doing it, but I’ve found that working with Shuffles as a creative business marketing tool, there are some basic steps I take when creating a collage.
1) Pick a theme
It’s important to decide what you want the purpose of your collage is. Are you promoting something? A collage for an event, a class, or a book would be focused on that event solely. Whereas if you are promoting an item, such as a hat, a purse, or even stickers, the item may just be one piece of a collage, rather than the sole focus. Understanding the purpose behind the collage is an important first step.
The theme will help keep your collage pieces in line with your purpose so as not to let your collage get off track.
For this example, my theme was fall clothing.
2) Find images that fit around your theme
Search Pinterest boards, Your Pinterest Boards, Shuffle Stickers, or even take photos with your phone.
3) Edit Images
Resize, change layer positions, move, lock items in place, add blending modes, change opacity, add borders, and add effects. There are so many ways to alter and edit an image to make it look the way you want in your collage. This is the step where I play with the layout and just try different things until the collage looks the way I want.
4) Add animation and overlays
There are a couple different ways to add movement to a collage and adding animation during the creation process can make images wiggly, slide side to side, or spin around. This feature allows you to draw attention to a part of the collage that you really want to come alive. You can add additional movement with overlays like butterflies, city lights, glitter shower, and many more. During the publishing step you’ll get to add additional overlays as well to add even more dynamic visuals to your collage.
5) Add text and handwriting
Shuffles offers the ability to add text. The color selection is limited but there are decent font choices and you can change the color of the font and highlight colors.
Handwriting can be added as well. You have a choice of pencil, pen or brush lines in small, medium, and large thickness. Again the color choices are limited. Adding handwritten words, marks, lines or squiggles gives a personal touch to your collages.
6) Add description & hashtags
Once you’re ready to publish your collage it’s a good idea to add a basic description and hashtags. Adding hashtags makes it possible for others to find your collage when searching Shuffles.
7) Share / Publish Collage
You can share your collage publically where everyone on Shuffles can see it. If you don’t want to share publically, you can send your collage to another shuffler or save privately.
Here’s a timelapse of my fall clothes collage
Heidi Cogdill 