I think a review of this book by Cathy Zielske is particularly relevant for SimplyScrapbookingNow.com because it's all about simple scrapbooking layouts, and that's what this site is all about - Keeping it simple so that we can create lovely layouts quickly and easily.

Clean and Simple Scrapbooking is the first in a series of books by the same author.  (I will be reviewing the others in the near future!) The essence of her work (to quote Cathy herself) is "Take a photo, tell a story and make a clean and simple page".

This book is great if you are a beginner because as long as you can set out some journaling on your computer to then print out onto cardstock or paper and know the basics of matting you can achieve the same results.  I recommend this book to beginners for the purposes of "scraplifting".  It gets them started.

And, if you are a seasoned scrapbooker, it's very useful too as it breaks away from complicated techniques and messy stuff to clean lines and the ability to churn out effective scrapbook pages in no time.

It's a breath of fresh air.  Great for inspiring the creation of new layouts using up some of the stash we already have.

You can see Cathy's graphic design background coming through on her pages.  She admits to working on 8½ x 11 (A4) format, and the main reason for that is the fact that she only possesses that size printer!  My scrapbooking page, pictured left above called "Always Smiling" was "Scraplifted" from a layout in the book (pictured above right).

But it is possible to achieve this simple graphic design on any size page.  

My page "We Three", pictured here,  is 12x12, but I managed to pass a narrower strip of white cardstock through the printer for the journaling and then stuck that to the dark green piece to lake up a 12x12 layout.  The layout from the book which inspired this layout is pictured below.

I will say though that a lot of her photographs are printed in black and white, a trick worth copying sometimes so that we can choose whatever colours we want for out layouts.

I have created a number of layouts inspired by Cathy Zielske's work, it does me good to simplify every now and then.