What Are Building Blocks?
If you’re new to Generations, you may not have noticed a row of small thumbnail designs at the bottom of your screen. Or maybe they’ve never been turned on (View > Tool Bar > Building Block Bar).
If you are using Generations version 1.6, you’re likely to see 5mm-Ltrs, the left most tab in the Building Blocks bar displayed instead of the image shown here.
These thumbnails represent designs that are stored in a specific location within the Super Tech folder. Each tab represents a folder. The designs are in the special Generations format of .mng, which is also the same format used by the Monogramming feature.
How Are Building Blocks Made?
Any design you can open or create in Generations can be turned into a Building Block by selecting Accessories > Building Block > Make Building Block… At this point you can select a tab and a name for your new design.
What to Turn into a Building Block
You can turn anything into a Building Block. They are most useful when they’ve been created as a native Generations file although this is not a requirement. Generally Building Blocks are small useful elements that you find yourself using over and over rather than elaborate designs.
Warning: Building Blocks are Addictive!
Making and using Building Blocks is quite addictive. Because they are generally simpler designs, they make great first digitizing projects.
If you are a designer and you have elements that you like to reuse, consider creating the elements individually, testing and perfecting them, and then turn them into individual Building Blocks. Now all you need to do is drag them out onto your work area, move, arrange, resize, mirror and rotate and create a new composition every time.
You can also add Building Blocks to purchased non-Generations designs and to your own designs.
Once you get started, you’ll easily get hooked and wonder how you ever lived without these things!
The beach tote shown here was created from the Summer Fun Building Block collection. Read more about the Summer Fun Cool Summer Project.
How to Install Building Blocks
Because Building Blocks are a special design format, they need to go in a particular place for Generations to find and use them. To install, simply drag the unzipped folder containing the Building Block files to your Super Tech/Generations/BuildingBlock folder.
Where to Get Building Blocks
Finding designs in native Generations format isn’t easy and you won’t turn up too many resources on the internet for them either. And that’s exactly the purpose of this website: to consolidate resources for the Generations enthusiast. Over time, I hope to add more products and links to this site.
As I write this post, I currently have 8 completed sets (20 designs per set) of native format Generations Building Blocks. By that I mean I have digitized all the designs in Generations. They are not converted from other designs.
The advantage of getting designs created in and supplied in the .gen format is that you have much more control over manipulating and editing the designs. And they don’t cost any more than standard designs.
Why Buy Designs in Generations Format if it can Auto-Digitize?
Sure, this program can auto-digitize. But you can also “manual punch” designs and that’s how these Building Blocks were created: by hand drawing using the Create Bar tools. No Magic Wand stuff on these designs!
You can see what’s currently available for Building Blocks and you can try some out for free:
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