Lessons

Lesson Info

Designing Wall Products

These are my word walls this is for this just a sampling of my word it's not all of them but what these are is like this so you can pair canvases with framed prints mix mixing I'm a huge advocate of mixing finishes on a wall I think it makes it look layered over time rather than just thrown together so I will mix like a print on canvas framed with two gallery raps but everything together with like an old wood barn frame to give it that kind of layered look so these types of products your client can't do on their own okay? And they love the message that it sends think about how many quotes and sayings you could use with your client any charming um any charming fairy tale or nursery rhyme or anything like that can be incorporated into this kind of thing and if you think about producing it as a product that's built over time and obviously these air just for for single uses but if you do it as something that product that changes over time with something like this you khun give this this ca...

mpus to them they buy at the very beginning plus the first canvas and then they're just gonna add on the campuses to complete the siri's over the top of this you guys saw this in mikey knows okay parents freak out over this stuff because it so cute and the height of baby plan excitement is at the very first session when they're still kind of looking forward to it you can also add another canvas in here that says tiny if you want to put the newborn in there so you can put tiny with a newborn image and then little middle big I mean you could really make it so that they have to finish the product I mean, if you think about it if they've got this little middle big and one canvas sitting there they got to keep coming back to finish it right and that's what? I really want you to think strategically when it comes to you baby plan think strategically with your product line what products can you come up with that will do this? It means combining products okay? It means going to different labs and testing out like I told you the trade show it means thinking of different ways to combining a word campus with an image I'm saying you could probably think of a product where we just did the photoshopped compositing you could probably think of a product that you d'oh at three months, six months and one year, four months, six months, one year that used that technique in it in a different composite every single session but that builds on like what if you did you know dean is four months deena's, you know, with the letters or whatever, what why? Why can't you do that kind of thing? There's got to be a way I'm like, I'm trying to think on the fly here and think of think of be creative and think of stuff on the fly, which isn't always working, but, um, I was successful with the whole round thing with this, so I thought maybe I could do another one out of my head, but it's not working so oh my, oh my! But anyway, you have to brainstorm because you could see it. It doesn't just come out all the time. What is important is to be inspired by other things. I was inspired to do these by going to hobby lobby. I went to hobby lobby, and if you look at hobby lobby in their decorating dick horse section, they have all these signs printed on wood and painted for your wall. They're just little word signs they're just like, you know, quotes about family and love and all that good stuff, and I thought, wow, can you put an image with that and that's how I formed word walls? This is actually every day I love you is is a quote is a famous quote which you can easily use you can use in your work, so I made my own and now do newborn images with you know a single single siri's and then I thought well how could you incorporate that into an annual product severally like words with images I think it's really beautiful I mean hello I'm a journalist but the middle little middle big thing came about because I was trying to think how I could make an unfinished product finished an incremental product so I really encourage you to think about this kind of thing and be inspired by anything be inspired by anywhere okay so to make this kind of thing is this jae players it okay all I did was I bought a texture off shutter stock you can use it you can use shutter stock images for commercial use you're buying it you're paying the royalties on it doesn't make sense so all this really is is a um shutter stock texture I started off with the white canvas added a shutter stock texture which you can then manipulate all you want you can put a color of blending mode you could make it dark you can invert it you can do anything you want with this to make it look cool but I wanted that linen striated look ok it's very simple then the text is put on and the paint which this was done in painter I just kind of made a little heart okay saved it as a png file and popped it over here so that it is its own little entity on an empty layer. Okay, so now I have loved you more love you most to be able to print and campuses I mean, how stupid simple is this it's? Not that complicated, it's just a matter of putting it all together takes time. My husband and I have this. This quote is, is our family thing it's from tangled she says love you more love you most love you most jester something like that so we always say love you more love you most like what he says I love you I say looking more he says, I love you most it's just kind of a sweet thing that we do and so I've transferred that into my own from my family and to my own work same thing with I love you to the moon and back you know, that famous thing we have ours is I love you to the sky and back in the sky never ends. So on my wedding bouquet, I had a little charm that said to the sky and back. So now I have a word wall that says, I love you to the sky and back and when I described that meaning all of a sudden the client becomes more unique instead of just I love you to the moon and back and they take on what I do in my own family and all of a sudden it's great that relationship it creates that brand it creates that connection and they feel closer to me and want want to keep that loyalty with us it's a company so I know I didn't talk about how to make this really heavily but honestly I think those of you who have even just a small photo shop skills can probably do this I only have like five minutes left you guys want me tio go over how this was done or are we good with that? Can we take some questions instead are there pertinent questions online what do you think okay yeah yeah do you print this yourself as this printed out on your printer at home is it printed through a lab when I printed for our client I've run it through the lab put it through white house custom color if I'm gonna frame it a print it as canvas on masonite find our campus on me tonight with a lester finished or a matte finish if I and then the images will go is that'll get framed in the frame and then the gallery rap campuses will get butted next to each other and those air printed through white house as well the reason I print my client work through white house as faras campus goes is that they are archive aly sprayed and protected and coded I do print campus at my studio for marketing purposes however they're not sprayed and coated so they're not archival I use it only for displays and things like that, like if I'm doing different stuff in my studio, I will print like crazy for samples left and right and just, you know, mount him on a piece of cheap phone course because I know I'm gonna rip him out probably six months later when I decide to do something else on the wall so yes, for my studio samples we print in house for clients it sent out good question yes, alright questions from the internet folks we're asking about if you are using pro selector another software as from jessica madero to present the mock ups of like the ezra one yeah before they actually ordered yes very much so and I'll go ahead and open up a album here in pro select hopefully I had to have these in here I can import him in if I don't yeah let's go ahead and import a couple of those in yes, I will go into pro select and add these in especially if I know the client wants a specific quote and I will go into room view and add the canvas on there, making it the side that I want let's go into teo twenty four that's better and then also add the images and yeah sometimes I will go ahead and like design this right in front of my clients and uh they get all excited about the process they're like oh my god that's so cute throw frame around that one that's too let's see here and I will literally design this in prospect right in front of them and show them what it looks like in their space or on on another space I'm not sure I like this image with it but a lot of fun to do in front of clients and they get super excited and sometimes if I know we're going for this I will design it in advance several different ways and then let them kind of decide which way they want it to go like I'll do it maybe with one image with five images or with three images plus the camp two images plus the word canvas or three or four images plus the word campus so I'll design in different ways even breaking out the quote so like sometimes all because I designed them so simply and photoshopped I'll take always keep your on one campus beautiful imagination on another and exquisite innocents on the last just to break it up how I want to break it out does that make sense so if I want to use like five images in a word wall I'll break up the quotes so that it works with five images that I'm doing okay? Yes I have a price on the specific the like the new logo everyone yeah the word camp assisting you think that was a print if there was an image not open but like an image print on campus okay so say for example my twenty by twenty four canvases five hundred twenty five dollars if this was twenty by twenty four it would be five hundred twenty five dollars because all the graphic design work that goes into that is actually more work than shooting and editing the image so I actually lose money on the campus part of it technically so to me it's each campus is its own entity and the word campus is the same price as if it was an image okay I have thought about like making little collections of it and I made test that out to see if it works like doing this as a set and instead of you know with the twenty by twenty fours and instead of it being seventeen hundred dollars it'll be fourteen ninety five you know I'm saying so they'll be a little bit of a deal on it if they do three campuses but I'm not sure I want to go there now granted they're always going to be getting digital files with it remember because I do credit collection so that lowers the cost of goods on it but even so I'm still tentative tto lose profit if I don't have tio okay? Yeah. How when you say you give them the digital images upto what size can they print? I mean, you're giving events on which side they buy, okay, so they get them all they get to choose whether or not they want gift print size, which means they can print to eight by ten or smaller, or if they want a full resolution same size that came out of my camera kind of images high rez, original negatives, that's what I call them that is what came out of my camera with whatever crops mean it's usually six thousand seven thousand pixel long image it's huge, especially when I'm shooting that d a hundred boy will lose a big files with e eight by ten files. I usually do eighteen hundred pixels on the long side at three hundred or two hundred forty p I they can print probably up to eleven by fourteen it would be really hard to get to sixteen by twenty, but also remember yes, I'm giving them on usb, but people are lazy. They don't take those to a lab. Why? Because I upload their images to my zen folio account, where I set what they can buy so the eight by ten images get an eight by ten price list for stuff they can on ly order things that are eight by ten and smaller and it says all over the literature that you can only print these state by ten so when they go in to order stuff it says, you know, eight by ten is the maximum size product they can purchase through the lab do I up charge on that stuff a little bit just to cover my costs. It's basically, my christmas money at the end of the, um it just kind of stays in my example, you account and then when christmas comes, I have a couple thousand dollars to spend on christmas, which is nice, but it covers my cost for actually take in time to upload all the images set everything up to that with simple leo, ok, yeah, about the procedures of the process is to set up. And when you're selling digital negatives, how do you go about putting those on the usb win the client vice them? Are you like burning the usb your disk? Right that in front of the client and like, are you sizing the images to do that before they get their yes know, before they get there after they buy? Okay, so what happens is when they buy, they say, oh, I want eight by ten images, ok? Or even the large ones what I do is great, you'll get to take those home today we're gonna put those on usb drive for you right now so I'm gonna go upstairs if you don't mind waiting five minutes I'm gonna go ahead and quickly process thes because when you order them all we can do it and batch I explained the new match um if they go ah lockhart they don't get to take him home that day okay they have to come back for the usb and this is kind of a selling point thing because I got to go through and pick which ones they did and a little more time during how you did it yeah, but since they're getting them all on create a collection I described a file I mean um scripts image processor I select the folder of where their images are so too I'll do these whatever I'm not actually going on and then I say save in the same location save its quality j peg ten resized to fit at eighteen hundred this is for the small files press run and go on just go bam bam bam it takes like thirty seconds to do I put him onto a usb get their printed paperwork bring the usb downstairs they signed the paperwork which means the order is final I package up the usb inside that little brown box I told you yesterday go in and basically say this is my little spiel to them when I'm giving them their file yeah, a few things to tell you there's important things you need to know about digital files please understand that these are not archival when they looked at me funny you need to back this up in multiple locations right now they're doing university research studies on how to make digital mediums archival. Every single piece of documentation in the world right now is being written electronically and there's no way to archive we preserve it and digital images are that way as well. So the safest thing that you could do for you images is take your absolute favorite images and put them in eight by ten and store them in a cool, dry, dark place. A professional printed print is archival to one hundred years or more. We can always make a new digital negative from a print we cannot print from a corrupted file the safest place for images to print them. That's archival a digital file is not and I know these air fun for sharing, but ultimately if you do not print thes they will eventually go away. They will die and they always look at me funny like really I didn't know that really well, I just makes sense, you know, they kind of this we'll start spinning and they go yeah, I scare that but it's true, I'm not saying anything that's not true I scared the bejesus out of them and all of my clients and that printing because of the stuff that I educate them on and the same thing goes true for you know, some of my marketing products back here we do, you know, when we send out stuff to a client, we talked to them about the the transitory nature of digital files, this little brochure right here that goes in there ordering kit tells them all about digital files, and on the front it has a picture of a cd on a wallet says, oh, honey, that cd looks perfect, you know, it's just cheesy, sarcastic humor, but it works and then on the inside, it talks about how fragile digital files are. The safest thing you could do is print, so they've seen this once before the order appointment, and then I beat us over the head again when I'm handing them or digital files going take care of these because they won't last if you don't. Okay, so educating your client on how important it is to print not only from an archive ability, standpoint, but also from your child's self esteem standpoint don't let your kid grew up on a hard drive kind of idea all that leads it kind of guilt him into printing, and I know that sounds bad, but I kind of want that I want them to print, so I want them to feel like, gosh, I don't print these all this money I just invested in this will go down the drain because the average life of a digital file I think, is ten to twenty years. Isn't it? Somewhere around there like it's not that long? Yeah, they print, then they go show up. Yeah, they pretend they show up exactly and I tell them about you know, we're taking imagery from the late nineteenth century photograph, scanning them, restoring them in photo shop and reprinting beautiful works from the first cameras are being redone because the images were printed. The print is archival, a digital files not and that's important, too relate your client. Once they figure that out, they kind of go oh, yeah, printing is good. If we had photographer start educating our clients like this, we're going to spin the industry around and start helping consumers understand that digitalis crap. Digital has no value at all. They think it has values that's, why we can charge for it, but really has no value at all.