Monthly Archives: January 2011

Today’s share comes from David of David Schertz Photography.  He writes, “Using the Inspire Me Cards: A Modern Posing Guide for Wedding Parties and Inspire Me Cards: Modern Engagement Posing Guide, I ordered two bound 4×6 proof books from WHCC with frosted covers. 4×6 is the perfect size to keep on the office desk or toss in my Thinktank gear bag. I needed a way to be inspired without taking up too much room. Since I’m on the road a lot too and am sometimes forgetful, I uploaded both Inspire Me Cards sets onto my iPhone and iPad (they’re always with me!) No matter where I go, I’ll be inspired.

The ‘Inspire Me Cards‘ are just awesome! I knew before I bought them that I had to get them bound and printed. I didn’t just want a digital copy sitting on my iMac or Macbook Pro. Once I thought about it, I thought it would be a great idea to have them on my iPhone and iPad. That way no matter where I’m at I can get a quick look before a shoot. My assistant can just grab my iPhone, iPad, or grab the bound versions from the gear bag. Besides the fact that these rock, my clients have been super happy with some of the poses that come out of our shoots. They credit with me such a creative look. I credit Design Aglow!”

We love what you’ve done with the posing guides, David, and it’s perfect for any photographer on the go! Thanks for the great share, and enjoy your $75 gift certificate on us~

Design Aglow goes lusciously linear. Sharing your creative collages while flawlessly coordinating the many aspects of your business has never been easier! Our Tastemaker Collection Marketing Set couples your beautiful images with brochures, business cards, gift certificates, letterheads, envelopes client stickers, price lists and more. And since this customizable set quickly and easily allows you to change colors, fonts and images to match your brand, you’ll love the clean, classic results without the worry.

What’s more, thanks to our instant download, you can create terrific marketing pieces today!

PRODUCT DETAILS:
This elegant set includes:
• Two-sided 4×5.5, 8 panel accordion brochure to market studios
• Two-sided business card
• Two-sided 5×7 gift certificate
• Letterhead and envelope
• Packaging sticker for client packaging or anything else
• Two-sided price list for offerings
• This set is fully customizable, consisting of layered Photoshop PSD files to easily change the look
• Fully automatic ~ Bundled Photoshop actions make inserting images a breeze
• Includes bonus InDesign version of the templates
• All elements are vector
• Compatible with Photoshop CS or newer, InDesign CS3 or newer Windows and Mac.

*Special thanks to Heidi Peters and Marla Carter for the lovely images.

Click here to check it out!

Staying organized is the backbone of any successful photography studio, and Design Aglow has the elements you need with our Essential Studio Workflow Assistant.  Looking for another great option to print your workflow board?  ColorInc prints this beautiful dry erase board with rounded corners, magnetic panels on the back, lightweight mounting, and it even comes with a dry erase marker!

Photographers are raving about the workflow board:

“Bought it last night and am already using the checklist! Love it and can’t wait to integrate the rest into our existing workflow – love the product – it is just what we were looking for! Thank you Design Aglow you hit the mark once again!” – Andi

“Awesome idea and something I have wanted forever but had no time to create! Thanks!” – Bobbi

“Can’t tell you how much I am loving this! Right in the middle of my crazy season, feeling totally overwhelmed and this helped clear my head. I personalized it, and am actually feeling in control once again. THANK YOU!!!!” – Sandy

ColorInc is offering a fabulous discount to Design Aglow readers to help you print your very own workflow board:
15% off your next order for existing ColorInc Customers with promo code : DA15
10% off your first ten orders for new ColorInc Customers with promo code : DA1010

But wait, there’s more!  One lucky social media king (or queen) will win a free dry erase board from ColorInc for telling your peeps about us.  Spread the word about the Design Aglow giveaway & link to designaglow.com/blog on Facebook, Twitter, your blog or any photography forums you love with the words “Organizing your photography studio has never been easier with Design Aglow’s Workflow Board ~ designaglow.com/blog”…and then come back here and leave a comment for each thing you do (max of four comments per person). Make sure you provide us with a link to your shout out in the comments section below and make sure it links back to us at the Design Aglow blog.

All entries must be submitted by 6 pm (EST), Sunday evening (January 30th, 2011). The winner will be announced Monday morning (EST)!

*UPDATE: A big congrats to contest winner Cynthia Trundle, who won a free dry erase board from ColorInc!  Thanks to all who participated and keep your eye on the blog for new fab products and fun contests coming soon….

This guide will serve as a tutorial to answer any questions you may have about using and printing your marketing set.

INTRODUCTION

The purpose of these marketing sets is to give all of your customer materials a professional, clean, and consistent look.  We professional photographers have to stay on top of our game and any materials given to our clients must be stellar.  We believe these marketing sets are just the ticket.  Not only are they gorgeous, but they are easy as pie to implement right away.  Similar custom designs done by a professional graphic artist would cost hundreds, if not thousands of dollars (euros, yen, pesos, loonies, or pounds – depending on where you are, of course).  With these sets, not only are you eliminating the cost, you are eliminating all of the time involved in contacting a designer, laying out an idea, revamping that idea, and of course, figuring out what to do with the designs once you have them.  Trust us – it’s not pretty.  With these templates, 90% of the work is already done for you.  All you will have to do is drop in your best stuff, customize your colors, text, and graphics, and send the set off to be printed.  The estimated time to complete a marketing and client materials package is only a few hours.

Now that the purpose is out of the way, let’s take a look at what came in your download.

In your download folder you will see all of the templates that will make up your marketing and client materials set.  These include:

An quad-fold marketing brochure

Business card

Envelope

Letterhead

Gift certificate

Sticker

Price list

Each item has a .jpg preview so that you may easily identify what you are looking for.

These templates are designed for Adobe Photoshop CS or newer and InDesign CS3 or newer.  This is not to say that they don’t work with previous versions – they very well may.  The files are un-flattened, fully editable PSDs and INDD files that offer literally limitless opportunity for customization and creativity.

In order to take full advantage of these templates, you should be relatively proficient in Photoshop.  Not an expert, mind you.  But you should have a general knowledge of layers, shapes, text and image manipulation such as using the transform tool, layer masks, etc.

If you are less familiar with Photoshop, don’t fear.  We will try to be as thorough as possible with the tutorial – and hey, you might just learn something new!

GETTING STARTED

When you downloaded your marketing set from the Design Aglow website you should have saved it in an easy-to-find location somewhere on your hard drive.  Take a moment to locate the folder.  Ready?  Great!  Let’s move on.

First thing’s first – you must unzip the folder before using any of the templates.  This is very important as Photoshop will not be able to work with the files in zipped format.  Use your favorite extraction program for this, such as WinZip (www.winzip.com) or StuffIt (www.stuffit.com).

After you have successfully unzipped your folder you should strongly consider backing up everything just in case you ever accidentally over-write one of the original templates.  This is always a good idea as re-downloading these huge files can be quite a bummer.  Use a blank DVD or portable thumb drive to save a copy, and put it in a safe place.

Printing your materials is always a tricky topic because, quite simply, there are an astronomical number of great printers out there.  And so many printers means a dizzying variety of sizes, crops, bleeds, formats, rules, and upload instructions.  You are welcome to look into any printing service and use whomever you wish.  If you choose to do this, be absolutely sure that you contact them for their own templates before printing your marketing materials.  You will need to resize everything to their specs BEFORE sending them to print.  Remember, everyone is different, so check first.

For this set we’ve chosen to use White House Custom Color’s (www.whcc.com) templates.  This is because their printing is beautiful, turnaround time is miniscule, and you can order almost everything for your set in one place.  (The letterhead and envelopes will have to be printed elsewhere.  But we’ve taken care of that too.)  But most of all, we like the fact that with WHCC you can do very small print runs (usually as little as 25).  That way, you do not have to commit to ordering thousands of something and getting stuck with them like some of the larger commercial printers require.

Ordering your materials in small batches will allow you to mix up your marketing for seasonal events and target certain customers with different looks without breaking the bank.  And of course, a photographer’s prerogative is to change his/her mind.  So you can tire of last year’s look and make a brand new look in the blink of an eye.

For the letterhead and envelopes, sorry to say, but you are on your own.  There are enough printing companies out there to create marketing materials for a small village.  We have used templates from 48 Hour Print (www.48hourprint.com) because we have worked with them in the past and haven’t been disappointed yet.  The turnaround time is – as the name very succinctly implies – 48 hours and the quality is good.  They also have some of the best prices out there.  We are in no way endorsing 48 Hour Print, so please contact them before you order just to check ‘em out.  We don’t want an army of angry photographers with pitchforks showing up at our door because of botched printing jobs.

As we said before, your templates can be customized in any way imaginable.  You can change nearly everything about them including the fonts, colors, image placement, borders, and so on.  Here’s a little info on how to customize a few key things:

Fonts:  We cannot include fonts in our downloads, as fonts are protected under copyright.  In order to keep the look of your materials the same as the original template, you will have to have the fonts we used installed on your computer.  If you do not have the fonts we have used, a quick Google search should turn up a resource in no time.

The font used for this set is:
Helvetica Neue

To change the wording on your templates do the following:
1.  Select the Text Tool from your tools palette (keyboard shortcut “T”)
2.  Click on the line of text that you would like to change.
3.  Highlight the text by dragging the tool across it.
4.  Type to your heart’s content.

Changing the colors of your templates could not be easier.  Here are a few tips on how to change the text, background, and stroke colors:

Text – Perform the same steps as if you were to change the text – text tool, click and highlight.

1.  Double click on the top color box in your tools menu.
2.  Choose the color for your text.
3.  Click “OK”

Background – You will see that the colors behind your text and graphics are in the form of shapes.  This makes it very easy to change the color on the fly.  Here’s how:
1.  Choose the color block that you would like to change in the Layers palette.  If you cannot see the layers palette, click the “Window” dropdown menu at the top of your screen and choose “Layers”.
2.  Now, double-click the small box of color next to the name of the layer.
3.  Choose the new color when the dialog box appears.
4.  Click “OK”

This is an area where any new Photoshopper could get a little confused and frustrated.  We’ll try to make it as easy on you as possible. (For the InDesign files, you can simply drag and drop your images onto the templates, but now we’ll provide instructions for those using Photoshop).

These templates are set up in a very simple way.  All of the text is grouped together, as is all of the graphics, and what we call “image layers”.  An image layer is basically a gray box that represents where your image will fit in.  Each image layer is numbered to make it easy to locate in the Layers palette.

Picture a framed photograph.  The gray box “IMAGE LAYER” is the matte and your image is the photograph beneath.  When you insert your image, the black box will represent where the image will be located and what the bounds of that image are.  You will not be able to see any area outside of the matte, as in a real framed photograph.

There is no need to pre-crop your images before inserting them into the image layers.  We will tackle how to place, crop, and resize in the following tutorial.

USING THE INCLUDED ACTION TO INSERT YOUR IMAGES

This set contains quite a few image layers, so we decided to include an action to make the process a little faster.  Follow these steps to add your images using the action:

1.  Double click the “INSERT IMAGES – TASTEMAKER COLLECTION.atn” file within your download folder to load it into Photoshop.
2.  Open the template that you would like to work with, such as “ENVELOPE.psd”.
3.  If you cannot see the image layers, try expanding the Group “Image Layers” by clicking the tiny triangle next to the group name.
4.  Press play on the INSERT IMAGES – ENVELOPE action in the layers palette.
5.  Follow the instructions that pop up along the way.

ADDING ONE IMAGE AT A TIME USING THE INCLUDED ACTION

You can also add the images one at a time by selecting the image layer you would like to populate (such as IMAGE LAYER 5) and running the “INSERT ONE IMAGE” action.

PREFER TO ADD IMAGES THE OLD-FASHIONED WAY? NO PROBLEM.  LET’S GO OVER HOW TO ADD YOUR IMAGES BY HAND:

1.  Open the template that you would like to work with.
2.  Choose the location you would like your image to appear in the Layers palette.  Example: IMAGE LAYER 1.
3. If you cannot see the image layers, try expanding the Group “Image Layers” by clicking the tiny triangle next to the group name.
4.  Open the image that you would like to insert into the template.
5.  Now, choose the “Move” tool from your tools palette. (Keyboard shortcut “V”)
6.  Drag your photo onto the marketing template.
7.  Go to the Layers palette and right-click on your image.
8.  Choose “Make clipping mask”.  This will create that bounding box we talked about above.

Notice how your image is now positioned within the frame and how you can still move it around without disrupting anything around it.  Pretty cool, huh?

You will probably also notice that your image is waaaaay too big.  That’s fine – we’ll now resize the image so that it fits perfectly into the opening.

To resize your image:

1.  Choose Edit –>  Transform –>  Scale from the top dropdown menu. (or you can just hit “Control+T” on your keyboard)
2.  Your image will now have handles.  If you can’t see the handles you will need to zoom out quite a bit.  Hit enter to cancel the transform, zoom out, and then hit Control + T again.
3.  When you mouse over a corner handle of your image you will see a double sided arrow.  Click the handle of your image, and drag in toward the center to scale down.  You may also drag out diagonally to enlarge your image, if need be. Hold down the Shift key while you are dragging to maintain your image’s perspective.
4.  When you are satisfied with the size, hit the Enter key.

You are all set!  A little practice makes perfect – the more you do these steps the faster and easier they will become.

Remember, wherever that gray box lies in the template is where your image will be positioned.  If you need to move your image, you will want to move the gray “IMAGE LAYER” box first.

We’re working on an incredible new product right now that will surely provide more customer requests through your online network. It will cover web design marketing across all channels of the Internet, from splash pages to Facebook fan pages. Learn how to make every element of web design grow your business, both quickly and cheaply.

Best of all – we want to showcase you! Complete our survey for a chance to get your studio blog, newsletter, social profile, embedded gallery, mobile site, widget… you name it, featured in this amazing new product. We’re looking for samples of great design and quotes about how a specific aspect of design helps you.

Completing our survey will also give you a chance to win a copy when it’s released . Click here to enter today, before the survey closes on Feburary 14.

Today’s share comes from Janet of Janet Moon Photography.  She writes, “I used the ‘A Year of Marketing – Playful Calendar Collection‘ for my New Year’s client gifts this year. I printed the calendar as a 10×15 mounted on 2mm styrene. I also added a one inch grosgrain ribbon to the top for easy hanging. I used the ‘Jolie Calendar Collection‘ last year and the reaction was so great that I decided to gift a calendar once again. Thank you Design Aglow for providing new calendar designs each year! I love that each of my clients receives a custom calendar that looks like I spent hours designing each one! Several of my repeat clients told me they were thrilled to have a new calendar with an updated portrait to replace their calendar from 2010. It isn’t just another boring calendar but a piece of art!”

Thanks for the great share, Janet! Enjoy your $75 gift certificate in the Design Aglow shop~