Creating Custom Designed Pages

With modern computers, printers, and word processing software, creating your own pages is really a snap! For me, I start with putting a border around the page to keep everything held together. In the old days I made my pages without borders and they just didn't look finished. Borders around a page definitely look better!

Once I have the border in place I usually look for some kind of symbol or clip art that symbolizes the theme of the collection. I put that at the center near the top of the page.

To keep anyone who looks at the pages connected, I put a title for each section in the upper left hand corner. I usually put a relative date in the upper right hand corner. And finally, I create frames around each stamp.

Once I get the page looking the way I want it to look I will make it the template for all of the other pages in that section.


This is my Space Exploration stamp collection, but the story actually begins with the first powered flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina on December 17, 1903. So the subtitle on these pages is "Aviation", the first section of my Space collection.

I posted a picture of the 1949 First Day Cover of the Wright Brothers in a previous post. This is what it now looks like on the page. I added a picture of Wilbur and Orville Wright as well as the single stamp that I got at the Wright Brothers Museum in Kitty Hawk on Saturday.

The page at the right moves the story forward into the Early Female Pilots. The two stamps, one of Amelia Earhart and the other of Bessie Coleman were also in the set from the Wright Brothers Museum. I added pictures of the pilots, and then added the stamps picturing the type of plane the women flew. Earhart flew the "Vega" and Coleman flew the "Jenny". Finally, I added a little bit of biography about each of the pilots.

The original title of my space collection was simply United States Manned Space Exploration International Stamp Collection. But after my trip to the outer Banks and the Wright Brothers Museum I changed the title to "From Kitty Hawk to Tranquility Base".

The reason for the US and Soviet flags was because much of space exploration was about what was called the space race, and includes stamps issued by the US and its allies for American flights, and stamps issued by the Soviet Union and its allies for Soviet flights.

So a large part of the layout of this collection will go back and forth between the launches of both countries.

The competition between the two adversarial nations was intense, but ultimately led to cooperative efforts in the Apollo-Soyuz launches, and currently to the International Space Station.