Limit your selection of materials.  It makes it easier if your collage materials have something tying them together, such as a theme, a color, a design style, etc.  Since Michael wanted something to do with music, we started by choosing sheet music to be part of the collage.  We took our color cues from that, and decided to go with a black-and-white theme.  This logically lead to our choice of black cardstock and background/texture paper.

Add an accent color or element.  To add a bit of pizzazz, we needed to add another color to our design besides black and white.  We chose silver.   This element or color will be used sparingly throughout the collage.  Three is a nice number of colors to use.

Use a variety of sizes and textures in your collage.  At first, Michael was trying to make all his collage pieces about the same size.  But it looks better to vary them.  To add more variety, he tore some pieces, and then used fancy-edged scissors on other pieces.  We also chose a variety of "lighter" and "darker" designs for the pieces.

Work off the edges of your project.  Collage pieces are all sizes and shapes, right?  So don't try to make them fit into the borders of your project at first.  Just lay them out, letting them overlap the edge.  When you are done, you can trim the edges evenly.

Use the rule of "triangles" to lay out your pieces.  The "triangle" rule is a great one for left-brained people!  Basically, it means that design elements should be placed on the page in a triangle.  For example, look at the photo and find the "cow spot" paper in the upper left corner.  Now, look for the other pieces of "cow spot" paper in the design.  You should be able to draw "invisible triangles" with your eyes between various pieces of "cow spot" paper.    This is because the papers are mounted all over the page.  The triangles are all different sizes and contain various angles, right?  Some are small triangles.  Some are large.  The angles within the triangles all vary from triangle to triangle.  This concept helps you balance out the page, as well as keeps the eyes moving around the overall design.  The same thing happens with the gingham paper, the sheet music, and the metallic silver (the metallic silver paper looks solid grey in the photo).  Now, not every element has to be laid out like this, but most should be to create "flow."

Create balance.  Notice how our focal point (Michael's name), is towards the upper left of the page?  We balanced that out by criss-crossing the silver metallic ribbon towards the lower right.

Don't stray too far from your theme/style.  You right-brainers might be able to get away with this, but I have more success keeping consistent within my project.  For example, we had to decide what to add where the ribbons criss-cross each other.  We tried a bow, but it looked too frilly for this project.  So, we ended up using an open round concho to hold the ribbons down, which looks very stylish and very appropriate.

Collages always look worse before they look better.  Ok, this is a weird rule to include, but I find it to be very true.  Every time I start a collage, I think that it is looking pretty awful.  BUT, once I add the focal points over the top and the final accents, it starts looking pretty darn good!  So hang tight and don't give up!

Add some final accents.  Collages look even cooler with a bit of accent stamping.  In this design, we used my music note stamp and black ink to stamp a few accent notes (also using the triangle rule).  On other collages I've done, it looks great to stamp over the whole thing with a line-image design in metallic ink.  Beautiful!  We also added silver conchos in the corners, curled wire, and 3-D'd the name tag to make it stand out.  Cool!