Guidelines for Submitting Articles

Guidelines for submitting articles for the Lavinia Stamps website.

We welcome articles from our readers, especially the “How to do it”, step-by-step kind. These guidelines will help you to prepare your words and pictures ready for submission. It goes without saying that only stamps and designs by Lavinia Stamps Ltd, should be used.

Please read each section carefully before submitting

Always contact us at Support@LaviniaStamps.com before starting work on an article in case we already might have a similar one on the same subject in the pipeline ready for publishing.

Step-by-Step Articles

Step-by-Step Articles (View an example here)

These should be submitted in plain text with no formatting (bold, italics, centring etc) and fully spell-checked. Start with a few short opening paragraphs to introduce the project, followed by a list of links to all the Lavinia Stamps products used, and then a short caption for each of the “step-by-step” photographs, in the following format:

[Pic 1] Caption text explaining the process being shown in the photograph. The wording in each caption should be kept short, up to maybe two or three sentences.

[Pic 2] Caption text explaining the process being shown in the photograph. The wording in each caption should be kept short, up to maybe two or three sentences.

[Pic 3] Caption text explaining the process being shown in the photograph. The wording in each caption should be kept short, up to maybe two or three sentences.

Etc, etc.

Photos for step-by-step articles should be emailed/Dropboxed separately, not embedded in the text document. The images should be shot/cropped either square or slightly landscape (avoid upright/portrait format) and if possible resized to 600 pixels wide.

Submitting Videos

It is perfectly acceptable to use a mobile phone to record your video, but please never with the phone upright. Always shoot videos in the horizontal (view) orientation to avoid having those ugly black blocks added either side. Make sure the phone/camera is held steady on a tripod or stand.

Video Format: Please avoid the highest quality settings, because the resulting large file sizes take to long to transfer/upload. Adjust your camera settings to either SD (standard definition) video (720 x 480) or HD (1280 x 720). The preferred format is MP4.

Length: On Facebook, more prominence is given to videos that are at least three minutes in length. By the same token, very long videos are less likely to be watched to the end. Keep them concise and well-edited, to between ten and fifteen minutes.

Music:  We cannot accept videos that contain music.  If any music is used in your clips, even a radio on quietly in the background, it could result in a copyright strike against our Facebook/Youtube channels.

Sending us your video
Please use the following link in your browser on a PC or mobile device (you do not need to have a Dropbox account). https://www.dropbox.com/request/MDIl38KOSVS4DfXxCj16 

Please email support@laviniastamps.com to say you’ve sent it, and write a short synopsis along with a list of links to the products you have used.

Videos with a filesize of over 2GB cannot be sent via the Dropbox request link, therefore please compress the video before sending it. If you don’t have a video editing program or Media Encoder, the free app “Handbrake“ will do the job nicely. 

Other types of Article

Always submit a synopsis of your idea beforehand.

Articles should be submitted in either plain text or in a basic word-processing format, (Microsoft Word is preferred) and fully spell-checked. Articles longer than 500 words will usually be edited.

These files should be free of embedded pictures. Suggested placement of accompanying photos should be marked in the text document thus: [Pic1], [Pic2], etc.

Text files should also be free of excessive formatting such as bolding, indenting, shading, colour, borders and highlighting. Arial 12 point is the preferred font, and articles should be left-justified and single-spaced, with only one space after periods.

Pictures
Format: JPEGs are preferred (High or Max quality); PNG are acceptable as well. If you have the facility, please make a copy of the original files and resize them so that the longest side is 1200 pixels. Files should be sent as email attachments, NOT embedded in a text document. If you have a lot of files, email them four at a time, or you can request a Dropbox link.

Credits: Photos must be original works, and if you are not the photographer, you must secure permission to use the photos with your article. Copyrighted photos are not accepted without the expressed permission of the copyright holder.

Photos should bright, and sharp, cropped nice and tight, and with no timestamps or watermarks. Low-quality photos or out-of-focus photos cannot be used.

Captions: Please provide captions for illustrations and/or include placement callouts in the article text, as needed.