Are you putting your creativity and desktop publishing skills to good use this holiday gift-giving season? Of course you can make your own greeting cards but there's so much more including personalized calendars and t-shirts with custom iron-on transfers. Need more ideas? Here are some from around the About.com network. Not all will require desktop publishing or graphics skills.

• Homemade Gifts for Walkers by Walking Guide Wendy Bumgardner includes calendars, scrapbooks, and walking sticks.
• 101 Great Gifts to Make by Family Crafts Guide Sherri Osborn runs the gamut from bookmarks and coasters to light bulb Santa, Sock Snowman, and of course scrapbooks, t-shirts, and cards.
• Packaging Desserts and Other Baked Goods for Gift Giving by Desserts/Baking Guide Carroll Pellegrinelli offers up creative and crafty ways to use jars, drinking glasses, ribbon, and other supplies to make baked goods look as good as they taste.
• Rubber Stamping Projects for Christmas and Holidays from Rubber Stamping Guide Kate Pullen includes projects to put your personal stamp on the gift-wrap.
• Getting Great Santa Photos by Photography Guide Liz Masoner helps you snap great Santa Photos for those Christmas cards you're sending out.

More Things to Make for the Holidays

While I'd heard of Scriptorium before (there are some links to them here on this site), it wasn't until I was poking around at fonts.com that I realized that this digital foundry is based here in Austin, Texas. So I started looking through their offerings and thought I'd highlight one of their fonts that jumped out at me the most.

Imprimato. It makes me think of medieval times, wizards and knights, and such. Some of the uppercase letters are lowercase forms and some of the lowercase letters are capital forms. And it has my favorite style of ampersand too. (Buy Direct)

I just like it. How 'bout you? I wondered about the name, Imprimato. A search for a definition kept prompting me with "did you mean: imprimatur" which means "let it be printed." Appropriate.

If you work regularly with Photoshop or other graphics software you may deal with layers all the time. But some people shy away from layers or may never have understood how they work. I've rounded up some tutorials and discussions on the basics of working with layers in several popular programs. Add another layer of knowledge to your design skills (OK, I couldn't resist that).

• First off, Liz Masoner gives you an introduction to layers including advantages to using layers when working with digital photography: What Are Layers and How to Use Them.

• Get a quick video introduction to working with Adobe Photoshop Layers.

• Sue Chastain has several tutorials on using layers including Selective Correction With Adjustment Layers and Masks and Layer Transformations in Photoshop.

• At eHow.com you can learn How to Work With Layers in Illustrator.

• Graphics software doesn't have a monopoly on layers. LaurenMarie offers help in Understanding InDesign Layers.

• In It's a Layered Look Jonathan Ferman highlights some uses and benefits of layers in QuarkXPress.

I wrote recently about how my daughter Lyla is starting to understand the basic principles of design. She's manager of a dance team at a local high school and is responsible for helping to create posters and other decorative items. Her most recent struggles have involved convincing others that "less is more." One girl has lovely handwriting so she was tasked with hand-lettering. But Lyla tells me it's a constant battle to get others to stop trying to add too many extra colors and stickers and such that only serve to hide the message and the pretty lettering.

Her new mantra at the school is "simplicity." It's a battle most all designers have fought in one form or another -- with themselves or with clients. If one picture is nice, two or three is even better, right? If you want to get attention then throw in lots of bold letters, wild colors, pointing arrows, and every other attention-grabbing device in your arsenal. If it looks wrong, the first thought for many isn't to take something away but to add more, more, more.

Before you point the finger at the client or the kid next door, though, make sure your own simplicity meter is in good shape. There's even a book or two on the subject. Less is More: The New Simplicity in Graphic Design (compare prices) isn't a new book (1999) but then again, less is more isn't a new idea. It's just one that is easier said than done. Another, more recent look at the subject is Graphic Simplicity (compare prices). Part of the product description pretty much restates what I said up above about knowing what to take away, "Simplicity is an ultimate element in design, but it is not so easy for a graphic designer to reach a level where he/she can choose only essential elements and discard the others."

This blog post focusing on Web design asks "Why is Simple So Difficult?" Some good thoughts expressed here. And this article, Simplicity: The Cobbles of the Designer's Path, again talks about Web sites but much can apply to print as well. "The path away from disaster passes through self-negation: when a site is designed using simplicity as the cornerstone, the designer has to sacrifice some of his/her ego."