Your Self Designed Album Pages

A few others of mine...

Lovely work Chris...Bravo!

Wonderful pages everyone.

Lots of great ideas. I totally enjoyed reading this tread.

Dianne

How do you pring the empty squares for the stamps ?

They are just "empty boxes" in PowerPoint. However, I do use Steiner pages as a starting point.

I need to print boxes on the Scott National blank pages. How do I do that ? I'm not very good at drawing.

Sleepy, can you tell us hat you mean by "print"?
Are you talking about actually printing, or do you mean drawing?

Peter

It's not really drawing, but draughtsmanship. Lightly draw pencil lines from the top centre to bottom centre and across the middle centre. Add any other lines until you have enough to be confident about placing your stamps. Outline your stamp boxes in pencil first. You'll probably make a few mistakes! Does Scott offer pages in quadrille, or just blank ones?

@chris & dvaldemoro - lovely pages as always, work of art, thanks for showing them!

I've entered an 'experimental' phase, considering a new storage strategy for the classical part (-1940/53) of my collection and swop from Vario to proper album pages. Problem is I do not find any pages that satisfies my need for giving room to and organize varieties. The Steiner pages are simply fantastic for collecting WW, however there's hardly any spaces for varieties. And I would need to build a new house if I should print all those pages... Example given, this is Steiner's 2 first pages for Australia.





I really like the Steiner appearance for its simplicity, but I like to go a bit more into depth of things, and at the same time I need to avoid out-growing my house. So here's how I have arranged the Kangaroo's and Geroge V's issues on 4 pages corresponding to the 2 Steiner pages above.






I'm including spaces for most varieties listed in Scott and/or Stanley Gibbons - and additional some 'free slots' for any other rare variety I should happen to come across.
Most of you will probably find my pages a bit densely populated. This is done deliberately to avoid divorce...., (do not need to build a bigger house) - and to reduce the need of flopping to much between the pages when working on a series. Each to it's own.

Here's the pages of George V 1926-30, indicating how I like to keep everything in chronological order. The regular stamps and corresponding official stamps (perforated OS) comes on two consecutive pages (my page # 16 & 17). Again, each to its's own....




Like others, I like to keep images to a minimum and in greyscale, not to steal from the stamps. I also prefer the text in as small letters as possible, again not to steal from the stamps. And small letters/fonts reminds me of some of those lovely typewriter-handmade pages I've seen from some hard-core-old-school philatelists... However I do like to have some images so I'm reminded what the watermarks or varieties look like, differences between different dies, flaws, re-entries etc, e.g. my page #19 and #28:




Even tough there's spaces for much more varieties then I will ever get, the empty spaces will never bother me. What bothers me if I do not find a space for a nice variety. Despite all the spaces I've already included, one will always need a page like this for any other stuff:



Tough the pages are dense, the count is 29 pages until 1953/QEII. Steiner arrives at 27 pages for the same years, but they are not including any spaces for the 'OS - perfins' (Officials), which took me 7 pages alone. So, comparing like-for-like I needed 22 pages, 5 pages less than Steiner, to arrive at 1953. Meanwhile I have included tons of ID'ed spaces for varieties and rarities - spaces I will never fill, but at least they are ready . I'm building the pages from scratch in MPT, however using a Steiner-look-a-like border, so that the pages will blend in somewhat with Steiner pages (for those areas/time periods I will not bother with making my own).

Now, I can't wait to get home and print those pages on 160g/m2 'archival safe' light cream paper! I have never actually mounted a single stamp on a 'proper' album page during my 30 years of stamping, so this will be a

(btw - sorry for all the words and ranting, I tend to get a bit carried away when writing about stamps....)

Hi sleepy,
Search for AlbumEasy it is a free program for creating stamp album pages.
The web site also contains a small but growing list of albums that you can download and print or modify if you prefer.

Clive

Hi ajuchum,
Images of the stamps can be distracting, if they are included I prefer that not every stamp is illustrated, but only one or two per set. I also prefer it if the images are much smaller than the actual stamps, that way they are not mistaken for the actual stamps and are easily covered by the real stamps, for example see stamp no 5 on this Danish West Indies page created by Bill Weston


Clive

Blaamand love your Australia pages. Though in some ways Stanley Gibbons listings for Kangaroo and George V Sideface issues are the tip of the iceberg compared to what the Brusden-White Australian Specialized list. I am working on layouts for the stamps on Vario and I know its gonna probably be a whole vario F binder to get thru 1936. The number of shade varieties BW lists for many of these issued is huge (the 1d George V typographed red on crown and A paper has over 20 shades listed.)

Not sure if this desire to have spaces for all these varieties makes me obsessive-compulsive or simply crazy, but it's fun!

I like very much Blaamand lay-out of Australian stamps. In my view, stamp album pages are for showing stamps, or studies thereabout, not someone's design or drawing abilities.
For this reason, I don't like unnecessary drawings on pages. What do they add to a collection? If I have nice proper stamps on my pages, I don't want nothing to distract from looking at them.

But, this is everyone's choice...

@Cursus - thank you for the kudos. Let me know if you need Aussie pages, and I can send them to you. (for free off course due to catalog numbering copyright issues etc)

@Gene - I hope you are doing fine these tough days, good to see you hanging around - hang in there .
Thank you for the compliment. Yes, I realize SG is far from a specialized catalog for Australia. I saw your posts about the zillions of entries to your Australia database for Postage Dues, Kangaroo's and GV alone. I'm impressed with the level of detail you are aiming at, imagine a set-up for those will even fill a Grande album easily! Being a WW collector I can not dive that deep, if starting to do A-Z for the entire world with that kind of details I would not even reach China before I'm due for stampy-heaven.



Both ....and it doesn't matter as long as you enjoy it

@ajuchum



If you really need images of stamps, I think the advice you already got from Clive is wise. Reduce numbers and size to a minimum. I would even had such images in greyscale, if not the actual stamps can often appear dull in comparison to the 'perfect' and photo-shopped images from catalogs etc.


If you have MS Excel already, I would presume you also have Powerpoint in your Microsoft package? If so, I would strongly encourage you to try using PPT instead of Excel. Let me add I have extensive experience with Excel, it is an absolutely wonderful program, however it is a spreadsheet program first and most and not explicit prepared for graphics. Powerpoint is. I have used hundreds of hours trying to make decent pages in Excel which could also serve as an inventory at the same time, but I do not get satisfied with the results so I abandoned the idea. Powerpoint will give you much more flexibility for working on and adjust the graphics to look exactly as you like, line up boxes, distribute them evenly horizontal or vertical etc etc. The program is more or less self-explanatory, but many folks in here use it and can give you advice if you get stuck.