Let’s chat about collage! How did this style end up in the digital sphere? What has it come to today?
You have to admit that there is something nostalgic about the act of scrapbooking and collage in the 2020’s. I grew up with a mom who kept scrapbooks of all of her kids, adorning pages with cut-out photos, stickers, and notes.
The hobby itself helped introduce non-professional designers to concepts like layout structure, color coordination, and typography—which are all core elements of graphic design. Scrapbookers combine images with embellishments and captions, which parallels how designers use grid layouts, visual hierarchy, and design elements in their projects. Even though my mom was no designer, it was accessible and was something she found enjoyable.
With the advancement of digital tools in the early 2000s, scrapbooking transitioned from physical to digital formats. This shift blended scrapbooking with graphic design software, as people began using programs like Adobe Photoshop, Canva, or CorelDRAW to create digital scrapbook pages. This popularized the use of layers, digital assets, and photo manipulation in personal and professional design projects. It also echoes to the way things were made in the past.
Today we see it used in some fun ways that I will share!
Barbara Kruger
Kruger’s touch on using photographic imagery as well as text overlay in her designs classify it as collage. Her process included taking pre-existing imagery found in mass media and juxtaposing it with high contrast, punchy text. Her work’s symbolism and messaging are extremely effective and compelling to the viewer, putting it on the map in graphic design history.
Eduardo Recife
Recife is a designer who is heavily influenced by vintage imagery and juxtaposing modern technology with aesthetics of the past. Many of his collages combine disjointed imagery, typography, and feature a unique handmade quality to them. His process includes manual collage techniques where he cuts out found media that he later scans in to manipulate digitally. I love how he employs typography within his art and it marries the digital and manual beautifully.
As designers, as we go about into creating a digital scrapbook or a collage design, we can appreciate the past and its old techniques that got us to where we are today. It’s an aesthetic that I cannot get enough of!
Read my last blog post: https://buzz.uni.edu/graphics4u/top-5-graphic-design-tools/
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