Incorporating Fill Shapes
30 January 2015
Every year, we’re suprised with the designs our editors come up with and this year is set to be just the same thanks to the new page designer and the freedom it gives to create awesome pages. New for this year is the ability to add fill shapes to your book so I’ve been playing around with some simple design tricks using these shape formations.
Making divider pages is something we’ll be looking at as part of our #Makeitmonday tutorials but this example shows a very easy way to incorporate fill shapes into your book. You can add a long vertical shape to the edge of page and then add your section titles over the top. Tonal colour palettes can work beautifully in this style especially when teamed with a designed background in a complementary colour.
Another way to incorporate fill shapes is to use them in your collage pages. You can pop them behind photos for a simple splash of colour or you can use them to create contrasting frames for select pictures.
To help me make a few photos really stand out in this book, I’ve gone for a polaroid effect which can be made using the humble fill shape. Firstly use the add shape button to add your rectangular box to the page. Remember to set your borders to white too so it appears completely white! Now rotate it slightly so it pops out from the rest of the collage. Add a photo over the fill shape and rotate it too. A little description under the photo in a lovely handwritten font such Mr Bedfort (found on page 41 of the font selector) will enhance the design further and let your most memorable moments really shine on the page!
A customer asked me to help with a simple maze design the other day and to be honest I wasnt sure if it would work out. I’m super happy with the results though and its a really lovely way to incorporate games into the yearbook, especially for primary groups! Again, this was created using fill shapes 
To create the maze, I first created two small rectangular fill shapes, one horizontal and another vertical. From these two shapes I could duplicate them (use CTRL + D) and shorten them into smaller rectangles forming each line of the maze. By piecing the maze together in this way, I could ensure everything was evenly sized and arranged just as I wanted!
So you see a simple shape doesnt have to be boring at all, you can really put these fill shapes to work if you think outside the box! We’d love to see how you’re using them so let us know your ideas and ask our support team if you need a little help bringing your pages to life 