The following is a guest post from regular contributor, Rachel at Useful Beautiful Home.
Have you heard of PicMonkey? It’s a free online website that lets you edit photos and do all kinds of fun tricks. Last time I posted here, I talked about how designing your own decorative labels for free is one of today’s popular organizing trends. Rather than posting it on my blog (Useful Beautiful Home), I decided to save this tutorial for all my Organizing Junkie Friends. This is intended as a basic level of instructions to get ya started. However, after exploring the site, you can easily get creative with the many options PicMonkey offers.
To help you visualize, I’m going to list the instructions in steps. Below each step I’ll follow with a picture or screen shot to show you an example. The red arrows are my additions to help point the way. So let’s get started!
How to Design Free Labels with PicMonkey:
1. Go to PicMonkey.com and click “design” located at the top. You won’t be using a photo but rather starting with a blank canvas to design your labels. If you want to sign in, go ahead but you can do all of this without actually creating an account.
2. This is what your next screen will look like. The white square is what you’ll be editing. Over on the left is an editor bar where you will be working. It will automatically open up to the canvas background color options. Move that little circle shape around to find your choice and hit the “Apply” button.
3. Now we’re going to resize the picture to fit your label needs. This can be done to whatever size you want or need depending entirely upon your individual project. So, you’ll want to experiment with sizes. For my purposes today, I’ll help you resize the label to fit a typical bookplate insert. What I’m making today was to label three of my Target binders. (FYI, I created them in purple in my demo below but ultimately I changed them to red as the final product.)
So, go down to “Resize” on the Edit bar and it will open up a small window.
4. To resize, you must first un-click the “Keep proportions” box and fill in your desired pixel size. For my binders, I changed the size to 144 by 72 pixels. This is roughly 2 inches long by 1 inch tall. If you find that’s not big enough for your bookplate label, you can try 192 by 96 pixels to get a 2 inch long by 1 inch tall label. Now hit the green “Apply” button.
5. Thus far, we’ve been on the same editing bar. Now we’ll switch gears and pull up all the text options. Go to the “Tt” along the far left size and click those letters.
It should open up all the font choices for writing your label and will look something like this…
6. Choose your favorite font and click the top button that says “Add Text”. A white outlined text box will appear on your label screen. You will want to drag the edge of that white box to fit over your label. This will adjust the size of your letters to fit as big or small as you want.
7. In the Text edit box, you can adjust the color of your word and also center your word (along with other options). You don’t have to center it, but I find it easier to work with by doing this easy step.
8. At the top, you will find the button to save your masterpiece.
9. After that, you’ll see a place to rename your creation. You can also change the quality of what you save and edit the dimensions once again. The bottom green button will save it to your computer in one quick step.
10. I usually save my labels to my desktop temporarily (pictured below) so I can find them easily and print them. After printing, they either get filed & saved or trashed.
11. Do not delete your original label from PicMonkey if you want to make several matching labels with different word descriptions. All you have to do is go back to your open file on PicMonkey and make changes as desired before saving it again as a different label. BE CAREFUL, once you close out your project or picture by hitting the tiny “x” in the upper right hand corner, it will be gone forever. This is an online program, so there’s no automatic save mechanism. Trust me, I’ve made that mistake many times! 🙂
If you have any questions, leave them in the comments section below and I’ll do my best to answer them and/or help ya out!
In the professional world, I’m a nurse by trade. But, around our house, I’m known as Mommy to our young daughter. My two worlds collided and began shaping into a blog. Useful Beautiful Home represents the hours I’ve dedicated to managing my household as efficiently as possible. I offer you motivation to keep your home healthy, organized, and welcoming. My goal is to share what I’ve implemented in my home to inspire you with fresh ideas and to encourage you to keep up the good work in yours! Learn more about me HERE or visit me at UsefulBeautifulHome.com.
Mellisa says
how do you figure out the pixel size for your labels. Thank you for the great tutorial I’ve been wanting to try picmonkey you’ve made it easy.
Rachel @ Useful Beautiful Home says
Great question! Inches multiplied by DPI equals pixels. If that sounds complicated, go to the website I copied below. Scroll down a little to the section that says “Convert Inches to Pixels”. They explain it in detail and will automatically calculate for you. Use the red line and chart to figure out your computer’s DPI. Happy you found this helpful! 🙂
http://auctionrepair.com/pixels.html
Kelly @ Money Millennial says
Thanks for sharing! What a great (and easy!) way to label and stay organized.
Rachel @ Useful Beautiful Home says
You’re welcome, Kelly. Best of all, PicMonkey is free! BTW, I love the money saving & planning tips on your blog!