Wanna be on the Team?

Hey check it out! It's time for a new design team to spend their time with us for a few months of creative magic and we want YOU! Our current team wraps up their term at the end of November and I know there are more fabulous, talented scrappers out there just itching for a turn with our team. The next term runs for six months from December to May. Interested?


Read the stuff below to find out the details of the Open Call...
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You are:
creative, passionate, committed and know the importance of deadlines and also that your best work is what you want others to know you by.

You love your art and the excitement of sharing it with others. You also understand that as much as you like receiving praise for a job well done that others do too and are eager to share the love. You are social, positive and enthusiastic...even when you're not really feelin' it.

We (Lotus Paperie) are:
first and foremost, a business but we understand that it's the people who make our business. We openly welcome all your ideas and suggestions, and are eager to make being on the Design Team as positive an experience as humanly possible for all involved. We are deeply committed to bringing creativity & joy to the lives of those who share in our passion for paper arts and all forms of crafting and have great respect for what others share with us. We are a warm and grateful group and eagerly anticipate growing the Lotus Paperie Team!

To make a submission you will need to email the following:
-3 of your best pages, one of which needs to be brand new (never ever published anywhere) and created from the sketch found at the bottom of this post. Please only submit your sketch-inspired layout to this call and we politely request that you refrain from publishing it elsewhere until you hear back as to whether or not you are invited to join our team. We want that page to be a big surprise to all our faithful blog readers, after which time we encourage you to share it with EVERYONE!!!

technical sidenote: please ensure that your images are sent in .jpg format and please don't send humongous files.

-write a brief bio about yourself including your scrapbooking interests/experience, as well as links to your blogs/online galleries and other design teams that you are on currently or have been in the past. Please be sure to include your mailing address & email address in your bio. Please be sure to include a photo of yourself. For our ease of file management, please include your bio as a Word file attached to your email. Please do not send your bio as the body of your email. :)

-email the above items to info@lotuspaperie.com and put "Design Team Submission" in the subject line. Emails received after 9:00pm PST on November 20, 2009 will not be considered this time.

Here's the deal if you are invited to join the Design Team:
-You agree to make pages/projects reflecting each of the weekly challenges posted to the Yahoo group throughout the entire duration of your 6 month term (November 1, 2009 - May 31, 2010). We understand that inspiration can peter out near the end of the term but please try not to let that be reflected in your work or your timeliness of uploading layouts.

-You will commit to doing a tutorial to be posted on the blog. Themes/topics will be assigned when the new team is in place. Designers will alternate weekly so you may only be asked to do 3 or 4 throughout your term. Vanessa & Tania will be doing the actual posting of the tutorials but you will need to write the "how to" part of your tutorial in Word (not the Vista version) with as many photos as you want. More is better. You will email the tutorial to our email and we'll do any editing before posting.

-Artwork can be created all at once or week by week, whatever works best for you. You will not be contacted if your submission misses the weekly deadline (thursday night, 12:00pm pacific time). It sucks if your work is regularly late. We schedule our posts to go "live" at 4:00am on Friday so that our east-coast readers can check out the challenges with their morning coffee. That means we are writing the post on Thursday. We want all the art to be ready for that time.

-You will submit well photographed/scanned digital images of your artwork. You will make efforts to eliminate unsightly glare & shadows from your submissions. Poorly captured images will not be posted however, those who are invited to join the team will be given pointers to help them make the best possible digital reproductions of their work if needed. Please request this information if you need it. Macro/detail images are welcomed to accompany your full-frame layout images.

-You will promote Lotus Paperie on your blog each week sharing your layout with a link to our blog. You will also keep the Lotus Paperie Design Team button on your sidebar with a link. It is important that you maintain your blog because our blog readers do click the links to all the DT's blogs and we want to give them lots of great stuff to read.

-You will not post pages created for the DT anywhere on the web (except for our private Yahoo group- see next point) until AFTER they have been published to the blog. NO EXCEPTIONS. If this is not respected, you will be dismissed and your spot will be available to someone new.

-You will upload your pages to our private Yahoo group. You will receive an email invitation to join the group where there will be an album for you to upload your pages to.

-You will regularly visit our Flickr group and leave positive feedback on as many of the uploads as possible to keep everyone's mojo going. Everyone likes kind words said about their work and it's important for our challenge participants to know that we are seeing their contributions.

-You will participate in the once-monthly request to select your favourite submissions to our Flickr group. You will be asked to email links to your favourite page to us so we can post a poll for our blog readers to vote on. You will be permitted to cast a vote.

-If you need to terminate your position, please try to give us as much notice as possible so that we can find someone else to take your place in the team.

Having said all that, we are regular folks just like you and sometimes things happen that get in the way of our plans. We are pretty flexible and understanding. We want this to work for you as much as we want it to work for us. We want you to be happy so if life gets in the way of something crazy has happened like the dog ACTUALLY ate your page, dude, let us know so that we can come up with a solution together!

international applications are totally okay! Bring it on!!. Please make all submissions by 12:00pm PST, November 20, 2009. The new DT members will be announced in early December and will be introduced throughout December.

One more thing, if you are a new scrapper or you've never been on a Design Team before, don't let that stop you from applying. We want to see everyone's work! Show us what you're made of!