Last weekend I took my niece and nephew to the Living Planet Aquarium in Sandy, UT. Since it was my first visit, I was trying to view the exhibits in a systematic fashion to make sure we didn’t miss anything. In the special Amazon exhibit, I spent five minutes trying to get my little niece to look at a blue frog that didn’t interest her all (my nephew and I both thought it was the coolest thing we’d ever seen).

Eventually I decided to stop trying to control her experience and just let her explore the aquarium in her own haphazard, two-and-a-half-year-old way. I even bought her a pink stuffed Nemo that she picked out in the gift shop, although I’m pretty sure every clownfish I’ve seen in nature has been orange.

I hope that when you use MyCanvas to build a photo book or poster, you feel free to explore, experiment and express your own personality. Our product development team has tried to give you as much creative freedom as possible, so that you don’t feel like there’s a control-freak aunt standing over your shoulder telling you where to put your photos or what colors you can choose for a border, background or caption (or stuffed clownfish).

This month we’ve added several new features that give you more flexibility than ever. For the examples below, I created a page in our “Baby Girl Pink” photo book theme. These screen shots are a little grainy, but I think you’ll get the idea. Although I’m using a photo book page to demonstrate the new features, they apply to posters and calendars as well.

First, our new layout switching feature lets you easily change the layout of an existing page. Go to the Layouts tab in the left panel to see the available options. In the top part of the Layouts tab, you’ll see the basic layouts that aren’t associated with a theme. In the bottom part, you can view the layouts for a particular theme. Use the drop-down menu to narrow down the options according to the number of photos you want to include on the page. There are also a few text-only layouts.

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By hovering over page thumbnails in the Layouts tab, I can see how this page would look if I applied a different layout.

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When I find the layout I like best, I just left click on the thumbnail to apply the layout to my page.

What if I want to swap these two photos so that the one on the left is in the right image box and vice-versa? Instead of finding the photo thumbnails and reapplying them to the page, I can use our new photo swapping tool to make the switch. When you’re on a page with two or more photos and you select one of the photos, you’ll see an icon in the top right corner with an arrow and two little boxes.

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Click on that icon, hold down your left mouse key and then drag and drop the photo into the other image box.

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When you release the cursor, the two photos will have switched places.

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You can do the same thing with text, too. Click on any text box. Then click the text swapping icon (which looks exactly like the photo swapping icon) in the top right corner of the text box.

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Hold down your left mouse key and then drag and drop the text box into another text box on the page.

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The caption from Text Box A will appear in Text Box B, but with all of the formatting attributes (font size, etc.) of the original caption in Text Box B.

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The last feature I want to show you is our new panning tool, which lets you drag a photo within an image box. You’ve always been able to pan in MyCanvas, but we’ve made it easier and more intuitive. Whenever you click on an image that’s pannable, you’ll see a compass-like icon in the middle of the image.

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What I mean by “pannable” is that the original photo has been cropped. Either part of the photo got cropped off when you dropped it into an image box or you manually cropped the photo after you placed it on the page. Panning lets you adjust which parts of the photo show up and which parts get cropped off. Place your cursor in the circle, hold down your left mouse key and drag the photo within the image box.

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Once you start panning, you’ll see the whole photo. The parts that are cropped out will be transparent. When you’re done panning, just release your mouse key.

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By the way, we recently added more than 2,000 new K&Co. scrapbook embellishments, as well as a new collection of masks with brushed edges. Be sure to check out our new features and content and then let me know what you think!

Many thanks to everyone who participated in our April 14 webinar. If you missed it, you can view the presentation in the archive at your convenience.

The program includes step-by-step demonstrations for creating four types of gift products:

• Collage posters
• Graduation posters
• Photo family tree posters
• Photo books

During the webinar, we surveyed the audience about what kind of gift products they were interested in. The most popular item was the photo family tree poster, which is something you have to design yourself.

Here’s an example to give you the idea:

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I gave this particular poster to my dad for Christmas. It was super easy to make. I just scanned in some old family photos, uploaded them to MyCanvas and designed my own poster from scratch. From the “Choose a Product” page, I chose “Collage Posters” and then selected the 20×16 size. I dragged the photos onto the page, changed them from black-and-white to sepia and added drop-shadows to give them some depth.

Then I used masks (under the Frames tab on the left side of the main workspace) to apply rounded corners to the rectangular photos and give four of the photos an oval shape. I typed in some captions and then, as a finishing touch, added two embellishments: the swirly pencil art in the top right corner of the poster and the quote (“Other things may change us, but we start and end with family”) in the top center section.

For a demonstration, watch the webinar. The photo family tree demo starts about 15 minutes into the presentation. As always, let me know what you think!

In keeping with our “freedom of expression” philosophy, MyCanvas provides many different tools for editing and manipulating text in a photo book, poster or calendar. We give you so many options that you may not be aware of some of them, even if you’re an experienced MyCanvas user.

In MyCanvas you can:

• Position a new or existing text box anywhere on the page
• Resize, rotate and copy a text box
• Choose from 30 different fonts
• Customize the font color to match another element on the page
• Customize the color of a text box background
• Adjust the opacity of a text box background
• Layer a text box on top of an image or another text box

To help you visualize how it all works, here’s a sample page I threw together. It’s a collage poster that I designed from scratch. Of course you could also create a page like this in a photo book or calendar.

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Since I wanted to stack the letters vertically instead of typing them in horizontally, I created a new text box for each letter. To make the last letter, “X,” I have two options. I can click the “Add text” icon in the main toolbar to create a new text box, which I can then place anywhere on the page.

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Or, since I’ve already formatted three text boxes, I can copy one of them using the Copy icon in the text editing toolbar.

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I just move the copy where I want it and then type an “X” in place of the “E.”

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Notice that I’ve put drop-shadows on all of these letters to add some depth. You can add drop-shadows to text just as you can to images.

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If I want to change the typeface, I click on a text box to bring up the text editing toolbar and then select a font from the drop-down menu. In this case, since I’m working with four text boxes, I’m going to apply the change to all of them at once to save time. To do this, I select the first text box and then hold down the Control key (or the Command key, if I’m working on my Mac) while I select the other three boxes.

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A few weeks ago I blogged about our new color picker, which lets you pick a color from a precise spot on a photo and apply that color to a border or page background. You may have noticed that the background of this poster exactly matches the blue from the side panel of Alex’s Spiderman costume. The color picker also works for text: you can use it to customize a font color or the background of a text box.

In this example, I’m going to multi-select the four text boxes and then change the font color to a custom shade of red that matches Alex’s costume — or, more accurately, a particular spot on his costume. I just grab the eyedropper tool and place it on the exact spot that I want to match. If I choose an area with no shadows I’ll get a different result than if I pick a spot close to a seam in the fabric, where the color appears darker.

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To add a background to a text box, I click the little white “A” box that’s right next to the color box in the text editing toolbar. I check the “Background” box to make a background appear. The background is white by default, but I can change it to any color I want.

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Now look at the slider just below the checkbox. It lets me adjust the opacity of the text box background.

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By default the transparency is always set to zero, meaning that the background is fully opaque. To make the background transparent, I can either slide the little bar to the left, type in a percentage or use the arrow keys to increase or decrease the transparency. In this case I decide to make the background about 50% transparent.

I play around with the backgrounds for a while and decide I like the effect of making two of the boxes fully opaque and the other two 50% transparent.

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To create the illusion of depth, I can copy a text box and then layer the original on top of the copy. I like how the “A” stands out when I set it apart from the other letters in this way.

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In this last version, I keep the layering effect but change the background colors for the other three letters, using a darker shade of blue that matches the shadowy part of Alex’s costume. In this example all the text boxes are fully opaque.

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I’ve only covered the advanced text editing features because the basic features — like changing the font size, changing the text alignment and using the bold, italics and underline tools — are pretty self-explanatory to anyone who’s ever used a word processing program. But it bears mentioning that only a handful of online photo book applications even let you do something as basic as centering or italicizing text. Most only let you change the font type and size and choose a font color from 15 or 20 options.

At MyCanvas, our goal is to provide much greater flexibility than other photo book sites without an overly complicated user experience. If you have any suggestions for how we can improve our service — with regard to our text editing tools or any other aspect of the MyCanvas experience — please let us know.

To provide feedback, you can post comments on this blog or send us a message through the “Give Feedback” link in MyCanvas.

We’ve added three new features to the MyCanvas publishing service that I think you’ll love. Many of you have asked for a way to keep track of which photos you’ve already used in a photo book. We agree that this is a pretty important feature ― especially if you’re working on multiple projects and can’t remember which photos you’ve used in which project ― so we’ve added little checkmarks to the image thumbnails to help you keep track.

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The checkmarks only apply to one project at a time, meaning that when you’re working on Project A, you’ll only see checkmarks for photos you’ve used in that project, not for photos you may have used in Project B. The checkmarks are continually updated as you work on your project. So if you place a photo on a page and then decide later to delete it, the checkmark will disappear from the thumbnail.

We’ve gotten quite a few requests for a calendar that starts in some month other than January. Most of these have come from procrastinators who didn’t finish their 2009 calendars in time for the New Year, but we’ve also heard from a few overachievers who want to get a jump on 2010. And I suppose there could be all kinds of reasons for starting a calendar at the beginning of the academic year or fiscal year instead of the official calendar year.

Whatever your motives, you can now pick the starting month for your calendar. On the “Make a Calendar” page, look for the drop-down menu right above the orange “Start working on your calendar” button.

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The third new feature is something nobody’s asked for, but once you start using it you’ll wonder how you ever got along without it. You can now pick border and background colors that exactly match a color in your photo.

Before we launched the magic color picker, you could choose from 70 predefined colors that pop up when you click the Colors icon in the image toolbar:

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…or use the advanced, full-spectrum color palette.

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The advanced palette lets you choose among subtle gradations of color, which gives you a lot of flexibility.

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The only problem is that it sometimes takes several tries to find the right shade. Here’s where the color picker comes in handy. To access it, click the little eyedropper icon in the top right corner of the color palette box. Now click anywhere on your photo. The border will automatically adjust to match the color of that precise spot.

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In the screen shot above, I matched the border to a fuchsia flower. By moving the eyedropper down about half an inch, I can change the border to match a red flower instead.

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You can do the same thing with backgrounds. When you click on the Backgrounds tab, you’ll see a little color box near the bottom labeled “or choose a background color.”

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Click on the box to access the color picker (as well as the basic and advanced color palettes). Then click anywhere on your photo to apply that color to the page background.

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The color picker works for text, too. You can use it to change font colors and also to change the background color of a text box. Try it…and then let me know what you think!

I got the printed copy of my 2009 MyCanvas calendar last week and wanted to share with you some of my favorite pages, as well as a few things I learned while making it.

Tip #1: It’s more fun when you build the pages from scratch.

My sister and I created the calendar together, and I think there was only one month where we used the image boxes that came with the template. Not that there was anything wrong with the layouts provided. We just preferred the flexibility of starting with a blank page, which is how we ended up with spreads like this:

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In the top right photo, our 12-year-old niece is in pre-teen heaven as she takes a break from swimming to read a few pages of a Stephenie Meyers novel and write a love letter to Michael Phelps.

Tip #2: Use a background with a pattern on the top and a solid background on the bottom (or vice-versa).

There may have been two or three months where we used the default backgrounds in the “Classic Calendar” template, but in most cases we changed both the top and bottom backgrounds. If you go to the Backgrounds tab and click the “All Themes” folder, you’ll see sub-folders for each of the photo book themes. I usually like to pick two backgrounds from the same theme to make sure they look good together. For September, we used two backgrounds from the “Autumn Holidays” theme.

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For August, I used the “Tiny Purple Daisies” background from the “Springtime” theme and then picked a complementary, solid purple background from the “Solid” folder.

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For December, I applied a home décor tip that I picked up from a design show on TV: use two colors from opposite sides of the color wheel. I got the inspiration for this spread from my living room, where I have a red chair and turquoise accent pillows. On the top I used the default “Classic December” background from the “Classic Calendar” theme. The bottom background is “Winter Memories” from the “Winter Warmth” theme.

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Tip #3: For the bottom page, try making a custom background that shows through the calendar dates.

This can be a really cool effect if you do it right. The trick is picking a photo that’s interesting but subtle enough that it doesn’t clutter up the page. Check out the spread my sister and I designed for October:

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We saved the baby ankles photo as a background (by right-clicking on the image thumbnail and clicking “Use as background”) and then made the block of dates transparent (by clicking the “Calendar transp.” icon in the top toolbar). When you make a custom background for the bottom page, be sure to use an image that coordinates with the top page but doesn’t compete with it.

Tip #4: Add visual interest to the bottom page by placing photos in the empty boxes.

In every month, the dates portion of the calendar has at least a couple of empty boxes before the first day of the month or after the last day of the month. You probably don’t want to fill in all of them, but placing a photo or two in the empty boxes can be a nice touch—especially if you have lots of cute photos of your brand new baby niece and they won’t all fit on the top page.

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By the way, we recently launched four new calendar themes, so if you haven’t started your calendar yet, be sure to check them out. My personal favorite is “Zippity Doodads.”

If you’ve already made a MyCanvas calendar, share your own design tips by posting a comment on this blog!

My sister Christel has never been comfortable using a computer. An experienced pediatric nurse, she works in the neonatal intensive care unit of a hospital that handles the toughest cases in a five-state region. She can resuscitate a two-pound preemie without breaking a sweat, but she doesn’t know how to use Google. Occasionally she calls to ask me for some random piece of information and I say, “Well, you know, there’s this brand new invention called the Internet…”

Every year about this time she starts collecting photos to make a family calendar — or rather, nine family calendars, since she always makes different versions for her siblings, parents and in-laws. For the past couple of years, she’s been using a popular photo sharing site that that offers rigid templates and a rather convoluted user experience. Creating the calendars is a painful process for both of us, since she demands that I sit next to her the whole time to provide technical and moral support.

So I was excited this week when I tried out the new MyCanvas calendar utility, which is so easy to use that I think even my technologically-challenged sister can manage it on her own. Best of all, the creative possibilities are endless. Our creative director, Chris Trainor, has designed a lovely template with a different layout for each month. If you stick with the template, you can build a calendar from start to finish in just a few minutes. But it’s more fun if you think of the template as a starting point for your own imagination.

Here’s the default layout for January. I can just drop a couple of photos into the image boxes and I’ve got a nice looking page.

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But let’s say I want to keep the portrait (vertical) orientation of this particular photo instead of auto-cropping it to fit a landscape (horizontal) image box. I can just extend the image box by dragging the bottom edge all the way down, and then resize the photo to make it fit better on the page. If I’d wanted to, I could have deleted both image boxes and designed my own page from scratch.

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When I get to April, I decide to keep the default layout, but I want a different background.

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No problem. MyCanvas has a large and growing selection of page backgrounds — almost 400 the last time I checked — and I can use any of them in my calendar.

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Notice that when I changed the background, the white leafy image in the bottom right corner of the page stayed put. That’s because it’s an embellishment, not part of the original background. I can either leave it there or delete it and add some new design elements to the page — in this case a couple of butterfly embellishments.

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Now let’s look at the bottom portion of the calendar. By default, the bottom page has a white background.

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If I want to jazz it up a little, I can apply a background to the bottom page, too. Here the background essentially functions as a border, since most of the page consists of a block of dates.

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If you want to make your calendar a little more personal, you can use one of your own photos as a background — just as you can in a MyCanvas photo book. Go to the My Photos tray in the left-hand side of the main workspace, right-click on a photo and then click “Use as background.”

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If you look at the top toolbar, you’ll see a Calendar transparency icon, which lets you adjust the opacity of the block of dates so that the background shows through. In the example below, the calendar section of the page is 62% transparent.

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Remember to pick a background for the bottom page that coordinates with the top page for the same month. You’ll get a chance to preview your calendar, so if you end up with two pages that look goofy together, you can always go back and edit that month before you place your order.

For September, I decide to apply a warm background called “Autumn Yellow” to the bottom page. Now I’m ready to add some special events. You can add up to three events per date. When I click on a date, a little black bar appears with the words, “Add/Edit Events.”

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When I click on that bar, a box pops up with spaces for up to three events, such as holidays, birthdays, anniversaries and any other day that you feel like celebrating. The calendar is pre-loaded with standard U.S. holidays, but if you live elsewhere you can easily delete those and add holidays that are relevant to you.

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After entering a birthday I can even add a photo of the birthday girl. Each date is a self-contained image box. I just drag the photo onto the page and drop it into the box for the right date.

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Using the zoom and pan tools, I can enlarge and reposition the photo so that the birthday girl’s face fills up the whole box.

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Then I just click anywhere on the page to crop off the rest of the photo.

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As always, you can insert text anywhere on any page. Note that if you enter events using the pop-up box, you will not be able to change the typeface or font size for that particular bit of text. You will be able to change the font color and alignment, however. You can also apply a different background color to the text box and even adjust the transparency of the background. If you don’t like the default typeface, you can simply create a new text box (by clicking the “T” icon in the top toolbar) instead of using the pop-up. That way you’ll be able to access all the options in the text editing toolbar — including the new feature I just mentioned that lets you change the background color and transparency of the text box.

If you’ve used MyCanvas to create a book or poster, you know that I’ve touched on just a few of the many ways that you can manipulate photos and other design elements in MyCanvas. If you’re new to MyCanvas, you might want to check out my earlier blog post to get a few ideas. Anything you can do on a photo book page you can also do on a calendar page.

If you have any comments about the calendar utility, feel free to post them on this blog or send us a message through the “Give Feedback” link in the top right corner of the main MyCanvas workspace. I’d love to hear what you think!

Welcome to the MyCanvas blog! In the future, I’ll use this blog to let you know about new features and product enhancements. Since everything’s new this time around, I’m just going to tell you about some of the cool things you can do with your photos in MyCanvas.

Create your own backgrounds

Most photo book tools give you a finite selection of page backgrounds. I’m happy to report that in MyCanvas, your background selection is limited only by your imagination. Any image that you’ve imported to MyCanvas can be a page background. (Note: If you upload images directly to MyCanvas, they must be in a JPG or PNG format.)

To add a background, go to the Backgrounds tab and click the “Upload Background” button. You can grab any image file on your computer and turn it into a MyCanvas background. All the backgrounds you’ve uploaded will appear in the “My Backgrounds” folder.

In addition, you can convert any image in the My Photos tab into a background. Just right-click on the image and then click “Use as background.” The image will be applied as a background to the current page. It will also be saved in the “My Backgrounds” folder. You can also right-click on an image that’s already been applied to a page to convert it to a background.

What I love about this feature is that it lets you fill up a whole page with one photo. You can let the photo stand on its own — which is a great way to showcase a particularly interesting or dramatic shot — or layer other images on top of it.

Here are a couple of examples…

Custom background

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Custom background

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I like the effect of using a close-up of a face as a stand-alone page. The thoughtful child in that last example belongs to one of our engineers, Greg Burgess, who happens to be a pretty good photographer. The photo of the German storybook village is from my brother-in-law, who is also a software engineer and photography buff (I’m seeing a pattern here).

The “Use as background” feature also works really well with scenic shots. Try using a scenic photo as a background and then placing a detail shot on top of it.

Custom background with detail

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Custom background with detail

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Note that when you convert an image into a background, the image is automatically cropped, resized and centered to fit the background area. Images that have a portrait rather than landscape orientation might not work very well. And depending on their resolution, smaller images may not look so good when they’re scaled up to fill the whole page.

Take your photos to the edge

Here’s another trick for showcasing your photos: drag a photo to the vertical or horizontal edges of the page, leaving some white space along one or two sides of the page. You can keep the white space white or add a solid background in a color that complements your photo.

Full-bleed photo

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Full-bleed photo

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To get this “full bleed” effect, drag the photo OFF the page, meaning that the edges of the photo will get cut off. In the screen shot below, the green outline shows the dimensions of the photo. This technique doesn’t work for every image — obviously you wouldn’t want to chop off someone’s head — but it works well in this case because the pieces I’m cropping out are mostly grass.

Full-bleed photo (auto-crop)

In the example below, I layered a vertical full-bleed photo over a textured background and then added a detail shot.

Full-bleed photo with detail

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Check out this two-page spread by Greg Burgess, featuring another of his photogenic boys:

Full-bleed spread

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I like how Greg made the photo from the left page overlap onto the right page. What he actually did was make a copy of the photo and then crop both versions to make them look like one continuous shot. This is a bit tricky to do, but it’s a fun idea to play around with — especially if you’re a “power user” who likes to get creative.

Adjust the transparency

Unlike most photo book tools, MyCanvas features a transparency meter, which opens up all kinds of design possibilities. Just click on an image and then click the icon with the little blue circle in the image editing toolbar. By default the meter is always set to 0, meaning that the image is fully opaque. Scroll down or move the slide bar to change the transparency.

If you’ve applied an image to a page with the “Use as background” feature, you can adjust the transparency and/or flip the image by clicking the “Edit Background” icon at the top of the screen. Alternatively, you can right-click on a page and then choose “Edit background” from the fly-out menu.

You can create some interesting pages by using a transparent image as a background and placing a smaller, 100% opaque image on top of it. In the example below, the German village is 25% transparent (75% opaque).

Transparent background

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If you place a transparent image over a colored background, the color will of course show through, which lets you create some interesting effects. In the example below, I layered a 50% transparent, full-bleed photo of the Alaskan wilderness over a textured pale blue background.

Layered transparent background

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In the final three examples below, I’ve left a border so you can see the background color at the top and bottom of the page. The German wildflowers are 50% transparent, the flamingos are 35% transparent and the moose is 20% transparent.

Layered transparent background

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Layered transparent background

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Layered transparent background

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I don’t typically include pictures of myself in this blog, but it isn’t every day that you get to pose with a moose.

I hope the sample pages I’ve presented here have sparked some ideas for showing off your own photos through your MyCanvas projects. Have fun experimenting with these features — and let me know what you think!