After a decade, digital scrapbooking is still popular. The idea of paying for a designer paper or embellishment only once and yet reuse it in multiple projects is still the best selling point. But I have noticed some changes in the scrapbooking industry over the past decade.

For a little history, digital scrapbooking really hit the top of its popularity in 2003 with the release of a book by Michelle Shefveland entitled Scrapbooking the Digital Way. This was followed by her website cottagearts.net and her Simply Digital CDs, containing digital scrapbook papers, layouts and embellishments.

Many digital artists including myself, were inspired to create their own digital scrapbook products and we saw many digital scrapbook suppliers appear online offering beautiful downloadable products. Some of these digital artists were lucky to become product designers for these website stores. I even sold some of my digital scraps on a few websites.

However, I turned my attention to digital animation and book apps in 2010, when I fell in love with Alice for the iPad book app in the Apple store. I spent the next few years creating the artwork and programming two book apps of my own.

I got interested in paper crafting again when I bought a Silhouette^R Cameo die cutting machine and started creating SVG cutting files. When I started looking for places to sell my products I was surprised to see that most of those digital scrapbooking websites have disappeared, except for some of the bigger sites such as Scrap Girls^R, Two Peas in a Bucket and Scrapbook.com. Sadly, I have read that Two Peas in a Bucket will be closing its doors in July of this year.

After studying both Scrap Girls and Scrapbook.com, I noticed that they have taken two paths over the previous decade. Scrap Girls is still a digital and hybrid scrapbook company, with an long list of digital designers. On the other hand, Scrapbook.com has expanded to carry many popular traditional scrapbooking products such as American Crafts^R, Bo Bunny^R, Cricut^R, Graphic 45^R, Martha Stewart^R and Tim Holtz^R. They carry everything from non-digital adhesives, papers and embellishments to die cutting and stamping products.

One thing that wasn’t around a decade ago are the online stores for designer paper companies such as Echo Part Paper^R and American Crafts. These stores carry their traditional paper and other products but also offer digital products. For example, Echo Part Paper sells digital products via JessicaSprague.com (newly renamed to Snap Click Supply Co.) and American Crafts via ACDigitals.com.

As you might imagine, the digital artist has much competition for a place as a designer in one of these stores. The place to start is to visit the stores and see what type of products they are carrying. Also take notice of what styles and themes are popular with the crafting community.

After a decade, as a digital artist, one option for selling your artwork is still to sell digital scrapbooking products such as digital papers and embellishments. Also popular are digital fonts, journaling cards, word art and brushes.