Digital crafts has a short history of only a couple decades but things change quickly in the craft business. What does that mean for the digital artists and craft designer in 2014.

Sixteen years ago, graphic software became available to consumers like myself, that couldn’t afford to pay thousands of dollars. My first software was Paint Shop Pro, which was owned by Jasc Software at the time. Being a life long crafter, I immediately wanted to create crafts with my computer. But the craft community wasn’t there yet and there were very few websites and craft magazines devoting pages to digital crafts. But things were about to change. In a few years, we had digital scrapbooking, which became very popular. One of the companies in the forefront of the digital scrapbooking was CottageArts LLC with their Simply Digital CDs.

But today, to be honest, the cost of ink for my inkjet printer is more expensive than using commercially produced designer scrapbook papers, which have beautiful designs on quality paper. Why not go back to working with paper and glue? A lot of crafters have made that decision.

So, where does that leave someone like you and me - the independent craft designer. Some may argue that the popularity of digital scrapbooking has declined, because many digital scrapbooking websites that were around a decade ago are no longer in business. But I think you need to look deeper at those websites still in business. Just what digital products are still popular today? The best way to answer this question is to visit a successful sites such as scrapbook.com.

Scrapbook.com is a large website and online store dedicated to scrapbooking. But if you click the Types link in the superstore, you will get a list of many products, with Digital Scrapbooking and Printables being only two of 31 product types. Some of the other traditional product categories include Adhesives, Cardstock, Chalk, Glitter, Paper, Punches, Ribbons, Stamping and Tools.

You will still find the digital elements, papers, alphabets and fonts in the Digital Scrapbooking category. In the Printables category they sell downloadable and printable products from E-cuts, which are printable design elements to E-Cut Completes, which are complete scrapbook pages ready for your own pictures.

But there is one newer category that you may wish to consider as a digital artist. This category is SVG cut files, which has become very popular with the introduction of personal die cutting machine to the craft business. Many digital artists, including myself, have started designing for these personal die cutting machines. You will see that some craft websites have an SVG cut file category in their online stores and some websites, such as svgcuts.com, svgcuttingfiles.com, mygrafico.com and svgattic.com, are almost totally devoted to selling cutting files.