by By Daphne Patrick
One of my hobbies is making collages/digital scrapbooking. I came from a physical media family who loved creating handmade scrapbooks and photo collages as sentimental gifts for each other and in my early 20s, I have found myself recreating this love language – and sharing it online.
I can’t go on without letting you in on this: I kinda have beef with photo dumps.
We post them and convince each other they are effortless and casual, but we all know they aren’t. We know there are TikTok videos with hundreds of thousands of likes with formulas (selfie, food, nature, outfit, selfie, friends, something pretty) and tips for “cool girl captions.” It’s hard to find the story here because it gets lost in the 21st century desire to seem effortless. But you know what’s obviously not effortless? Collages.
Why does this matter for young professionals? How could my disdain for casual instagram translate into real skills in storytelling? This is how!
Visual Hierarchy: Deciding What Gets Seen First
Every time you make a collage, you’re making a ton of decisions about what deserves our attention. For example: should the concert ticket be bigger than the coffee cup? How many pictures of myself should I include? Does the sunset photo anchor the corner or float in the center? All of these choices are lessons in visual hierarchy, the foundational principle behind every social media post, presentation, and marketing email you’ll create professionally. Collage-makers learn that the human eye and emotion needs a journey through an image.
Color as Communication
When I’m building a collage, I’m not just picking pretty colors. I’m creating a mood, setting a tone, evoking a feeling. Little green sprouts line the edges of my spring collage to communicate things being new again, hope in the change of the season. The mid-summer post was flooded with riches from my farm job, tomatoes, jalapenos, blueberries, I communicated a season of warmth and abundance through the background images, and I sprinkled the love and abundance throughout with small images of my friends and lovers over top of the produce. This is color psychology in action, and it’s the same principle behind brand identity work. Understanding that color tells a story before a single word is read is what separates good content from forgettable content.
Storytelling Through Juxtaposition
Collages are special to me because meaning is created by what you place next to each other. A photo of my cat next to my graduation dress would mean something different than a picture of her just cuddling up in a blanket. You get the ability to create a narrative through proximity, which is sort of how memes work, how Instagram carousels function, and how ad campaigns are made. I think the translation is here: when brands need someone who can conceptualize a campaign that layers its meaning, they need someone who thinks like a collage-maker.
Curation as Strategy
Choosing 15 photos from 200 requires ruthless editing and a clear sense of the story. This is a journalistic skill, a PR skill, an ad skill. This is content curation, and it’s a full time job in our industry. Every brand is drowning in content, which means the skill for us lies in knowing which pieces work together and which can be cut. (we learn this in JCOM 203: Writing as Practice when it comes to cutting words, shoutout Brandow.)
Why Emotional Design Matters Now
In a world where AI generates technically “perfect” images in literal seconds, what makes your work valuable is what machines can’t replicate, emotional intention and TIME. The reason you chose that specific photo, the way you layered elements, the vulnerability in sharing what you actually love rather than what performs well, that’s irreplaceable. Brands are realizing perfect, polished content doesn’t connect anymore, people are getting the ick.
Making the Shift
I am going to start talking about my skills differently. Switching from saying I do “social media” to “visual storytelling and content curation.” I will start to use collage-making to document my professional journey with monthly recaps of projects, skills learned, articles read and post them on LinkedIn. My (and maybe your) hobby can become visual proof of my skills developing and translating into professional abilities real time.
So, I am going to keep making my collages, and keep choosing obvious, loud, heartfelt effort over “timeless” and “clean” effortlessness. I think I will keep showing what I love online. Because I realized that I am not just having fun, I’m building a hard skill that companies need in my own creative voice.
Check out more of my collages on my Instagram @ddanddelion
Daphne! I love this! Something that is SO important with story telling is the use of color. Like you said, you’re not just picking pretty colors but your deciding the emotion that it going to be shown. Color theory is everywhere and especially in entertainment. It’s so interesting analyzing it and I love that you showed personal examples.
Hi Daphne! I love these so much they’re so cute! I love the way you explained everything in this post. Color Theory is so important when making these type of collages because it shows the emotions of each picture! I love your examples as well I feel like I can tell that you had a fun time putting these together as well as each moment from those photos.
Your take on photo dumps is bold…however I do enjoy a digital scrapbook having grown up with a Mom who loved to make physical scrapbooks. There were some new ideas presented to me in this article that I never considered or thought of (maybe because I prefer dumps) like thinking about what gets seen first.