We thought it might be useful to document the process of starting an online business from scratch.
Jim Coudal and Steve Delahoyde will periodically post here about issues involving our
product and business plan. Hopefully things will go well but even if the whole thing goes down in flames,
it’ll probably be interesting to watch.
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Our Life in Pictures
We asked for a Mom or Dad with design skills to write us a note if they'd like to try our system free of charge and document the creative and production process. Andrea Buchanan, author of "Mother Shock: Loving Every (Other) Minute of It" (Seal Press, 2003) and managing editor of LiteraryMama.com, an online literary magazine, answered our call. Here's Andi's account of completing a run of photo CD's to be given as gifts.
I was very excited to participate in this project, as I had been planning to put together a CD of photos to send as a gift to relatives, but was stuck on exactly how to create a package that would be more appealing than the standard slim CD case. Once I downloaded the files from jewelboxing.com, I decided to use the Photoshop templates – I would have preferred to use Quark, but Quark and my printer were not getting along, so I ended up designing everything using Photoshop.
I had a concept in mind for the first design – my husband had taken a series of photos that had great light and nice color balance, and I thought those would work well. I opened the PSD "king tray" template files and used them to figure out the sizing I'd need for the photos I wanted to use. Once I sized the photos correctly, I just dropped them into a new layer in the PSD template. Then I adjusted the opacity of the photo layer so I could see the guidelines in the layer beneath and make sure the photos were aligned correctly. I used the text tool to add a layer of text to the graphics. I did this for each of the templates – the inner and outer tray, the disc label, the inside and outside booklet – and my design for jewelbox number one was done.
I first printed the booklet out on plain paper using my black and white laser printer to make sure everything lined up where it was supposed to. [ed. note: while this is a good idea to check your layout, we recommend printing a plain-paper test on the printer you'll use to print the cases, because alignment can change between printers.] I checked the printout against the actual templates and then went back to the files to nudge a few things into place based on what I saw comparing my printout to the template paper. Then I printed the outside booklet using my ink-jet color printer. It came out fine, though, due to my printer, it would have looked nicer on a glossy page. [ed. note: news on this soon] I did the same thing for the rest of the templates – printing out in black and white on plain paper to make sure things were good, then printing on the real thing in color. A few times the black and white printing helped me realize I'd forgotten to hide the background template layer, so that was a good step to include in the process.
After that first design was done and printed out, I did do some reprints to adjust a few things – the text on the CD label didn't pop enough for me, so I changed the color; one of the photos rendered too dark on my printer, so I fixed that. Mostly, though, it was a painless process.
I had two more layout ideas, so I actually designed those right on top of the first design, creating a duplicate file for each, using the original design as a reference for size and positioning, dropping everything in on top of that, and then deleting the original layer(s). I then followed the same basic printing procedure I did with the first design (though I eliminated the printing-in-black-and-white step, since I knew the graphics were aligned correctly and would print well). I'm very happy with how all three turned out!
December 23, 2004 09:21 AM