GOING A LITTLE RETRO (5/16/08) I took some of the take from the big wedding over to the parents of the bride. Nice Flash gallery built in Photoshop. It looked good on their computer and I do enjoy the company of happy clients. Except... the navigation was cropped out by their tiny monitor which made it a lot less elegant to view than it should have been. My first thought was to adjust the settings. But my second thought was that this is just a specific instance of a general problem. Every client needs to be able to see the take. So how about we go a little retro and provide printed proofs instead of or in addition to digital versions?

I gnawed on how best to do this and decided finally to a) print on plain paper so the proof sheets can be marked up with order information, and b) showcase the proofs in decent presentation albums to make up for print quality, and c) while I'm at it, make up a couple of really nice folios. I can carry one to show new clients and leave one with a popular local jewelry store for which I'm doing some webwork. So I ordered albums from Pearl ("the world's largest discount art supplier") in Florida. The first order was a little flakey (e.g.: I got an email update that "some" of my order had shipped but the rest was "either out of stock or discontinued..." which is it, and what part? I had to call to clarify what was enroute.) The product in hand looks good.

Now, I think what I want to do is to put a few top-quality prints in the proof albums to show what the real prints will look like follow those up with many pages of proofs from a middling-quality, low-cost desktop printer. I don't want the proofs to be mistaken for finished prints; I want them to be credible but not beautiful representations of the photos; I want to produce them in-house; and I want always to remember that these are sales tools, not pieces of art in themselves. So price, speed, and reasonable representation are the orders of the day. I've got my eye on an HP1215 which seems the right combination of price, performance, and ongoing costs. Stay tuned. My Canon S9000 is too good, and too expensive to operate for this purpose.

:: back to the slow blog ::