HIIII!!! I wanted to ask how you make the layout (?) for your picture perfect series.
Hi there <33 Gonna be honest, i’ve been secretly hopping someone would ask just because i had so much fun figuring it out lol
It’s more simple than it looks like tbh. I made a step by step, it's under the cut just because i added images / screenshots as i go so it’s easier to picture what i’m describing. I insist, it's really simple, it just felt like a big wall of text without the images.
I started with taking screenshots of my phone’s photo library UI — in my first try it was a bigger screen shot that i placed the images on, but that was a dumb and over-complicated way of doing it lol
Instead i ended up making one for the top part and the other one for the bottom, to make sure it all stayed white and looked more like a clean slate i just spammed my gallery with white background pictures i downloaded from pinterest :p (of course feel free to use these two if you want this lay out / UI and don't have the same iOS or have android, they're literally just two screen shots lmao)
Next step was downloading the pics from pinterest, i based the organisation on my phones Ui again. It has a grid that is 3 pictures wide, and when i adjusted it to be the size of a full screen shot it had 4 columns; so i made sure to have 12 pictures for every character. // I'm pretty sure you can change the 3x4 grid proportion in the actual photo library app if you want to, so it wouldn't be unbeliveable if you wanted to make your smau look different, this is just the standard grid on iPhone.
The issue with having this many pictures is that tumblr can be a pain in the ass with uploading and placing them (+ i belive multiple of them cut weird on my first try), so i went into Picsart* (although im pretty sure you can do this in any basic image editing app on your phone/tablet) and chose the collage option.
*All of this can fully and absolutely be done in their free tier
I chose the 3x1 layout (aka the collage pictured above lol). To get the images to stay in a square ratio. To reach from side to side of the screen without sacrificing quality/readability, i changed the general ratio to the “X header” option. The rest of banners/headers also work for the collage to reach from side to side, but don’t always keep the images in perfect squares.
I’ve used this option for making fic headers and similar stuff before, and for those i usually forgo having any visible borders (you simply slide the borders meter to 0 lol). In this case i noticed the UI does have thin borders between the images + it makes it look more integrated in the post itself. So, for the thin little border, i figured out 10pxl is enough.
From there i just layered the 4 headers in a tumblr draft however they looked best, tbh. You should have 6 banner-style images total as the ed product; the opener with “library” and the date on it, four rows of three pics each, and the last layer with the menu buttons.
This is something more based on personal tastes, but as a tip: Given that everything was image-based and there was a lot of info on screen already, i also used the library and menu pictures as a divider for my title / text from the post itself instead of my usual, blog-themed ones.
And that was it!! Don’t think there’s anything left to explain, but if i’ve missed something do let me know and i’ll gladly say how i did it!!!
Again, thank you for asking because i felt really proud of the layout when i figured it out lol and making a mini tutorial was really fun too!! If you ever go for it and make your own versions, i'd love to be tagged to see them :D Much love <33
