Design your own initials as a great decorative element for your own magazine. You've probably noticed them before when browsing through an old book: the particularly beautiful first letters of a chapter or a paragraph. These richly decorated letters are called initials. While browsing Pinterest, we discovered a great variation on initials that you can easily make yourself. What are initials, anyway? Initials are what we call the first letters of our name, but also the first letters of a sentence at the beginning of a chapter or paragraph in a book or magazine. In old books, they are always particularly well decorated. In a magazine, they are usually kept more simple, but still eye-catching. After all, the initial is supposed to attract the reader's attention and make him read the article.
How do you create beautiful initials yourself?
In the makerspace, you can easily highlight the first letter of an article or paragraph, for example, by using a large font size and/or giving it a different, eye-catching color. If you want to be extra creative with an initial, we found a great idea on Pinterest: You can also easily create such an initial yourself by placing a letter in front of a beautiful illustration. Load the desired illustration into the makerspace and place it in the right place on the page. Then add a text field on it, write the letter in it and change the font size and color to your liking. Our tip: Choose a simpler font for the initial and white or another muted color that is also used in your illustration. Then your initial will look best.
How do you find suitable illustrations?
The easiest way to search for beautiful illustrations is and remains a search engine. For example, try search terms like "floral ornaments", "mandala" or "floral patterns". Often it also helps to add terms like "drawing" or "pencil drawing". In a few clicks you have a large selection. However, please make sure that you are allowed to use the illustration. Many illustrations on the Internet are freely available, but not released for free use. If you want to make sure that you do not violate any copyrights when using an illustration, you can change the settings of the search engine in the search options.
How do you turn a self-drawn design into a digital illustration?
You've drawn a great design yourself, but you don't know how to get it into the makerspace? If you just take a picture of it, the white background of the drawing might have shadows or might not be as nice white as the background of your magazine. That's why we looked for another option and found it: Use an app that lets you scan documents and save them as PDFs or image files. For example the app CamScanner. It also worked wonderfully with our drawing. We took a photo and the app automatically adjusts the background and edits the black lines. The new images can be saved as a .jpg and sent by e-mail, for example. As you can see, it's not that hard to create a great initial for an article in your magazine yourself. If you still have a question or get stuck, just send us a message. We are always happy to help. Have fun trying it out.
