Seriously? I LURVE my new cards but they are seriously…FAT. My printer dude, Kent Aldrich at Nomadic Press warned me only very few would fit in a standard size holder because the paper stock is so….thick. So I went hunting for a holder of fat cards. The BIG goal was to find something that would work to BOTH hold my fat cards AND extend my branding.
I went to cute boutiques that sell only accessories. Nothing.
I went to every place that sells other stuff and also accessories. Nothing.
I couldn’t even find something that would work and was…ugly.
I was nearly resigned to a rubber band when I found these little boxes that look like books with magnetic closures…when I wasn’t even looking. I can fit a whole stack in each. I am fully aware these don’t match my branding but they are so dang cute, they will certainly do for now and sometimes, you just shouldn’t fight a solution when it appears in front of you. I’ll keep one in my purse and one in my car. Woot!
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A long time ago when I was first out of high school and going to college, I worked at a large printing company for several years. My job was to check or “audit” the printing orders for discrepancies and then depending on the papers, inks, designs or printing processes required, I had to route the orders to the correct departments. This was when most orders were received via the old fashioned US postal service. Often included with the order were samples of the customer’s previous business card, letterhead or envelope.
There were so many interesting designs, some with raised ink, some gold stamped, some embossed or engraved on luxurious paper. Handling the stationery made each of those companies real to me somehow. Since then, I have often kept random business cards, not because I want or need the product represented, but because it was interesting as a printed piece.
So when I first had my own business cards printed, I have to admit, I failed. Although adequate, the cheaper cards I got weren’t luxurious or tactile at all. At 2.75″ x 1.10″ they were mini-sized and uber cute but they didn’t EVOKE. I wanted something more… so I started looking at other options and without much resistance I gravitated to a process which began in the 1400′s called letterpress that pushes ink into paper. Although expensive, I somehow knew this is what I wanted to do.
I searched online for somewhere I could have my cards made using letterpress. After sending inquiries to a few local companies and emailing back and forth about whether or not my card’s design would be too complicated for letterpress, I was almost ready to give up. It simply was not meant to be.
About then I finally connected on a great phone call with Kent Aldrich of Nomadic Press in West St. Paul. He said, “I think this is a really interesting design and I think I know a way to get the look you want.” Jackpot.
We set about discussing how it would work and hired Cassandra Correll of Fresh Intent Design to make some special changes to the artwork to support how letterpress works. About a week after the final graphic revisions, Kent called to set up a time for a press check. A press check? Really? How cool is that? So a few days ago I took a little trip over to West St. Paul, only getting slightly lost, to see my cards come alive. I had no idea what a fun visit it would be.
Nomadic Press lives in a building built in 1914 and stepping through the door is like a step back in time. I was excited to meet Kent after having lots of discussions about MY cards and as I walked across the wood floor to shake his hand, I realized everything about the place was in character, including Kent himself. He’s a sharp guy with a demeanor both humble and entertaining, a true creative, which I wonder if I could ever be. And after more than 20 years of being in his business and serving up this experience, my excitement was not lost on him nor was he bored with it.
My card was laid out on the front table in just the perfect light, begging to be photographed, which I did grinningly and almost danced to the 1930′s swing music playing from somewhere. And then the phone, which I thought was a prop, RANG. I continued entertaining myself and nosed about snapping happily away with my digital camera while Kent took his call from Herbert Hoover.
When he was finished with his call, I started asking questions. Kent explained bits of the process and I learned all of his presses were made before 1900. I watched him run a few cards, setting the paper carefully in place, run the press, take the paper out. Move to the next press. Do it all over again. Each of them. My cards required printing BY HAND on two presses and they still have to be cut. Sheesh.
After the printing demonstration, Kent played the genuine good host and answered all my questions about each piece of cutting or stamping or book making equipment. Of course, now I want to be a letterpress printer. It seems I have a bad habit of wanting to do everything I think is interesting but I am trying to learn to stay focused and now I simply photograph everything I think is interesting.
Now, not only do I think all the antique things at Nomadic Press are cool AND I think mostly everything branding and marketing is cool, what Kent DOES, but I also have a very strong interest in small business. To my delight, Kent’s wife is a designer and her office is UPSTAIRS. So we meandered up the nearly 100 year old stairs to see the once-apartment-turned-studio and I got to meet Emily and see her work space. Seriously? Two small businesses under the same roof and in the same family? I am so jealous of both of them, yet so excited to see them achieving as small companies and giving hope to cottage businesses everywhere.
Thank you Kent for the tour, the hospitality…and especially my business cards, which definitely EVOKE and are everything I hoped they’d be.
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I struggled with LR too. So I took an expensive class. Two days. Eight hours each. I gave up a weekend. I’m a bit of a computer and software geek, about as geeky as you can get and not write code for a living (I do work in the software industry…but not photo editing software) so the slow pace of some of the other non-technical attendees made it excruciating. I had what I needed in the first 4 hours, but I didn’t know it until it was over…because I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I’m telling you this to explain what I went through to be able to tell you what I’m going to tell you here, and encourage you to also bother to INVEST time, money and energy if you are going to learn this software. Knowing what I know now, I recommend lynda.com because you can go at your own pace, pay for only one month, and watch and listen to the tutorials in your pajamas.
That said, here we go with a new way of thinking that has NOTHING to do with the actual edits…
The BIG CONCEPT of LIGHTROOM: It is a NONDESTRUCTIVE editing program. It’s a DATABASE. Very exciting geek stuff. LR has a file called “Lightroom 3 Catalog.lrcat” where it keeps track of everything. Everything. So you NEVER want to blow that away. In fact, backing it up is a good idea. The database keeps track of all the things you do in LR to a file but never changes the actual RAW file. Read that last sentence again. Not one pixel is hurt during your editing. Ever. Not even when you export to jpeg because the RAW file stays parked where it is in all its original glory and the jpeg is a new file. Instead, as you go along with your “editing” all of your intentions for each image are saved up in the database and what you see on the screen is a simulation of those changes. If you make a duplicate image in LR, that also is not another RAW file, it is simply a separate set of intentions associated with the same RAW file. Holy smoke. That’s it. That’s the big concept.
Although there is SO much more functionality to learn about than I can explain here, there are FOUR main areas that will help you to “get” it and get-you-going. Import, Export, Library and Develop.
Let’s start with IMPORT. When you import your images into LR, you are NOT importing them into LR exactly. Rather you are basically telling LR about them so LR puts the location of the images into the database catalog and creates a preview image to go along with the RAW file. In Library mode (across the top), choose Import… (lower left) to show the import functionality. The left pane has Source folder choices to import from and the right pane has Destination folder choices to import to. In the middle are Copy, Move and Add. Copy leaves the images in the Source, makes a copy in Destination and adds them to the catalog. Move moves the copy from the Source to the Destination (for instance off a memory card into your images folder) and adds them to the catalog. Add simply leaves them where they are and adds them to the catalog. This is how you tell LR where to find your stuff. If you later move an image simply by using Finder (Mac) or Folders (PC), LR will not know about it in the catalog and will think your images have gone missing. See? If YOU don’t remember where YOU moved them, you can ask LR to find them simply based on the name (and the catalog still has the preview image and all of the plans you made for that image so when you find it, you don’t have to start over). You can still move your images any time, just do it in LR using Move. Upon IMPORT you can also add tags or rename all of the images all at once (see the right pane) for that particular import event. For instance, image 4567 will become 4567-Peterson and the tags might be “Wedding” and “Peterson” and “June” or whatever. (Try importing a handful of images so you can exercise the software as you read through the next paragraphs.)
Next is the Library mode itself. There are SO many things you can do here, but we are simply going to do high level stuff. Hitting the G key at any time will jump to Grid in Library mode so do that now. The left pane now tells you all about your “groupings” but remember only folders have anything to do with the real location. Think of the others as grouping tags that help you to sort. Clicking on these helps you to only choose the images to work with instead of looking through EVERYTHING to find what you want. Click on All Photographs to show all your photographs LR already knows about. (Skipping Quick Collection for now.) Click Previous Import to show all the photographs from your last import event (important because it’s usually what you are working on). Folders show which images LR knows about in those folders. Collections follow rules that you set. You can create a new one by right clicking over there, choose Create Collections and name and set the rules for the collection.
Now back to Quick Collection…if you hover over an image in the grid, a little circle appears in the upper right corner of the image. If you click the little circle, then the image is now tagged to the Quick Collection. You can put a bunch of images “in” the Quick Collection, then choose the Quick Collection itself and isolate only those images to work on. Click the circle again and it is no longer “in” the Quick Collection. By now you know I’m typing “” around “in” because we all know the RAW image is still “in” the same place as it was when you imported but the database is simply keeping track of what you want to work on, so it’s not really “in” a folder called Quick Collection anywhere, right? (Note: You can clear out Quick Collection all at once by right-clicking on it and choosing Clear Quick Collection.)
To get to the next steps, tag a few images for a Quick Collection. Choose the Quick Collection and then choose Develop from the top of the screen.
You are now in Develop mode Develop is where you make image editing decisions. Because you chose the Quick Collection, those are the images showing across the bottom. Besides some other stuff (remember I’m only writing enough here to give you enough to “get” it), the left pane has Presets (ya Baby!) and History. Clicking on a Preset instantly changes the image as you SEE it…but again the RAW file has not changed one bit (literally). You probably already guessed you can import and make your own presets. History is a list LR makes to keep track of all the things you’ve done to the image so far. The right pane contains all the controls for what you expect LR to do such as white balance, contrast, sharpness, lens correction, vignetting and SO MUCH MORE. One super cool thing that simply cannot go without mention is the Sync operation. Notice if you choose two images (or more) at a time, the first one you choose is indicated a little brighter and the others are a little um…not as bright. Also notice when you choose more than one image, the Sync button appears. Sync will distribute the changes you made in the first image to the other images you chose at the same time. Seriously amazing!
Now since LR is not changing one bit of the RAW file (not one pixel), you will need a way to capture your changes in a useable way (something OTHER than the RAW image and a list of intentions) and that means Export. Click on Library at the top (or G for Grid). Choose the images you want to export and choose Export from the bottom of the left pane. A new dialog box will open showing all your options. TONS of options including file format, sizing, watermarks and my favorite, Presets (ya Baby!). You can build your own presets for output as a jpg to edit in PhotoShop, or output to be sent to a lab, or a folder location, or output presized to work with your blog. Before LR I handled each image for this individually. Talk about a time saver.
Okay. If you got this far and understood half of that, you should now “get” how LR is very unlike Photoshop and how it could possibly save you TONS of time. YAY!
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Hey Lisa,
Thanks for posting this! You’re a gem of a friend! I printed it to reference when I attempt to tackle “the little monster!” 
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