We got Drew’s album in the mail the other day. Opening big boxes full of finished books is always a little nerve-wracking, because we’re never quite sure how they’ve turned out – if the color is off somehow, or if there was some kind of printing mistake, or if someone spilled a bunch of glue on a stack of books or (the WORST) if we somehow missed a big mistake that WE made. The anxiety is even worse for a project that’s not entirely our own, and that someone else (namely, Drew) has invested a lot of time and energy into. So, we usually open boxes while holding our breath.
The album jacket looked great! Matthew was either happy or crazed!
No printing errors to be seen! And look at that lovely half-box full of discs! (we received a couple more boxes that were twice that size)
It wasn’t until I actually sat down to write this post and gloat about how there were no errors with this project (sadly, a pretty rare occurrence) that I realized I hadn’t actually taken out and looked at the disc itself. And found this:
Now, I know this isn’t really a big deal. In fact, in case you can’t even tell what the problem is, it’s that the “O” isn’t supposed to just be a solid oval, it’s actually supposed to have an empty middle like most “O”s do. BUT – it isn’t really what we asked (or paid) for, so it counts as an error. Ah well. Things don’t go perfectly every time, I suppose. In fact, it seems with our track record, things don’t go perfectly most of the time. But it’s not the end of the world.
[Basically] happy to have the album in hand, we realized that we’re coming to the end of our very first year of Bobbledy Books! Drew’s album is the last item to ship before we start the cycle over again with another book. This is exciting news, but also brings with it the sad reminder that some people will resubscribe and some probably won’t. We want to encourage people whose subscriptions are running out to re-up without being too annoying (hint hint hint). So we figured putting a bright, eye-catching sticker on the album would ensure that people would see the note without us having to send them too much extra stuff.
As usual, Matthew designed the sticker with some lowbrow sketching:
It didn’t seem complicated, so I went to work:
The first version, with black type on pink, got the thumbs down:
“Not bright enough!” he exclaimed.
The second version, with lime green type on pink got a so-so:
The final version, with lime green on pink and a turquoise bar got a “Yes! This hurts my eyes!!”
As you can see, they’re pretty much identical, but it took us half the day to get there.
Feeling satisfied, I arranged the design so it would print out on a sheet of labels, 30 to a sheet:
And pushed print. I only printed one sheet out because I haven’t done an actual count yet of how many people will need a resubscribe sticker. And it’s a good thing I only printed one sheet out, because it looks like our printer doesn’t quite print all the way to the right edge of the right column of stickers, leaving an unseemly white margin:
Argh! So, to save us from either having to trim down the right column of stickers or waste a bunch of stickers, I opted to just set up the design to print on two columns and leave the third blank. I can use the third column later to print up address labels.
Whew! So, great! This project is done! It only took up half the day! I was feeling pretty good about myself until I actually stuck one of the stickers onto one of the albums this morning when I started writing this post.
WHAT?! First off, this isn’t a book! It’s an album! What the heck?! How did we not notice that until now?!?!?!?! And second, that electric pink barely shows up on the red! What were we thinking??? Oy.
Matthew looked at it, and, defeated, suggested that nobody actually cares whether it’s a book or not. I insisted that though nobody cared, it’s still a pretty weird thing to have a sticker on an album that says it’s a book. After some heated discussion, we both realized that the operative information that actually needs to get across is that it’s time to resubscribe. SO – another bit of design wrangling and we came up with this:
Yeesh. Two days and a lot of headaches later, we finally have a stupid little sticker to remind people to resubscribe, and we both feel about ready to expire ourselves. With luck, we won’t ever need to design these again (it would be a big help if nobody ever let their subscriptions expire, hint hint hint. Plus, you’d get the added bonus of making even more work we did totally defunct).