We are pleased to bring you a brand new feature at MyPicTales: The Design Center. The Design Center, formerly the Backgrounds Community, previously offered hundreds of free backgrounds for use in your photobooks, cards and calendars. Now, we are offering premium designs, including predesigned pages that make creating your keepsakes quicker and easier than before. You can purchase single pages, or multi-packs, all designed to coordinate and mix and match. This quick page albums are a great resource when you are short on time, or can’t find the mojo to design something from scratch. We have a few designers who continue to load the shop up with fantastic designs for you. We will be featuring one designer every day this week. We hope you’ll stop by to see what they have to offer, and for the chance to win some prizes generously donated by the designers.

How To Use Quick Pages

The quick pages you will find at MyPicTales are slightly different that what you may be used to. We’ve optimized them for use with our software, by providing each page with a JPG background and frame cluster overlay. Simply drag the background, the frame and your photo into the photo bin.

Drag the background onto your page, choosing SINGLE PAGE BACKGROUND from the pop-up menu.

Drag your photo onto the page, and click ADD PICTURE.

Then, drag your frame onto the page next to it. If you try to drag it on top, it will replace the photo, so drop it next to it. You can reposition it later.

Now, resize and arrange them both so the frame overlays on top of the photo. You may have to crop your photo to fit behind the frame. I actually find that placing the photo on top of the frame helps to position and crop it. When you are done, just rearrange it by choosing LAYOUT>ORDER>SEND BACKWARD.

Just add journaling and your stunning page is complete.

Some of the designers have opted to provide you backgrounds in several sizes, ready for printing in any book size you choose. You can also assemble these pages in your photo editing software, like Photoshop Elements or CS. If you do, simply flatten and save a JPG, and drop the entire page as a background within our software. Either way, you can have stunning pages complete in just a few minutes.

You can purchase this quick page in the Belgian Chocolate Truffle Set 3 from LaShea Dzines from the Design Center.

Let’s Talk Credits

Why does MyPicTales Design Center use credits? Since purchases of digital files are in very small dollar amounts, the percentage of fees for processing the tranactions can get quite high. By using credits, we keep the transaction fees down, allowing us to pass that savings along to you. In addition, this allows us to pass on more of the sales price to the hard working designers who are sharing their creations with us. As an added benefit, the more credits you prebuy, the more you save. So, purchase your credits now, and cash them in later for as few as one credit at a time.

How do I purchase credits?
It’s simple. Just log in, and click CREDITS on the left side bar. If you have an existing credit balance, you can find it at the top of the new screen. You can then select the number of credits you’d like to purchase, and checkout using PayPal. You do not need to have a PayPal account to use your credit card. Simply click PayPal and enter your credit card information without logging into PayPal.

How do I redeem credits?
That is simple too. Find a product you’d like to purchase with your credits. Below the product description, click ADD TO CART.

After you click, you will see your shopping cart summary on the left of the screen. Click VIEW SHOPPING CART to complete the transaction.

You will now see the entire contents of your shopping cart. Click CHECKOUT to finalize your transaction. Your credits will be deducted from your existing balance. Any additional credits not used will be left on your account for future purchases, valid for one year from purchase date.

We hope you are as excited about our new Design Center as we are. We hope we can help you create even better memory books, cards and calendars with these new graphics.