Using Commercial Use Items to Design

I know there is a place for commercial use items when designing digital scrapbooking kits. They can be real timesavers. But they need to be used sparingly.

I saw a preview for a kit today. In the description, the "designer" had thanked five or six people for their commercial use actions or products. I recognized where nearly everything in the kit came from. You will notice that I put the word "designer" in quotes. I am not sure you qualify for that description when all you have done is select the colors.

I have read complaints from others about seeing the same bows, etc. in too many kits. I rarely browse in a store (old pokey dialup), but I do sometimes browse the thumbnails in the product gallery at DST. Even with as little browsing as I do, I have noticed an overuse of these products.

If you are going to call yourself a designer, you need to learn how to use your software BEFORE you open a store. I don't mean you have to be a whiz at it. I am not sure anyone could ever know everything about Photoshop, unless maybe you are Scott Kelby. But you need to get well beyond the basics and then keep honing your skills.

That said, I have bought some PSP scripts and PS actions and styles myself. They are part of the supplies I am building for moving into some scrap for hire projects. I am in the process of creating my own papers and templates as well as some basic elements. The scripts, actions, and styles will be timesavers for making little extras to set off a layout. But if I were designing kits for sale, they would not be part of what I would use.

For instance, I do know how to make a bow, but it is very time-consuming to do a good job. It is much easier to use an action that can take a paper and turn it into a matching bow for your layout. But if I were going to make a bow for a kit to sell, I would make it myself. Or if I were pressed for time or bow-making was not my forte, then I would at least tweak it a bit with the warp brush/liquify filter so it wouldn't have the exact shape as all the others. And if I hadn't mastered the PSP warp brush (yes) or the liquify filter in PS (not yet), which are certainly basic skills, then I wouldn't be ready to design for a store.