HappyFish blog

As we walk around Costco and see Christmas supplies ALREADY ….. (?!) … we are reminded that the album companies deadlines are looming soon. If you have clients who are hoping to have their albums to them before the holidays it’s best to get started as early as possible. This also can save you on RUSH charges!

Here are a few album company deadlines that I have found - please confirm for yourself as well to be safe. I’ll try to keep adding albums and making changes as I hear more. Please let me know in advance if you are planning to have designs fulfilled that must meet these deadlines please contact me so that I can reserve time for your project. Limited space available. We are currently on hold for taking on ‘new’ clients so that we can service our current clientèle and clients sent over to us from Vision Art.

VISION ART
Monday, December 3rd BEFORE 8am. will ship no later than the 18th of December. You’ll need to have appropriate shipping chosen to ensure a speedy delivery.

ART LEATHER
They wrote: No official date has been determined yet, but they suggest mid-October. The earlier the better.

LEATHER CRAFTSMEN
Their email wrote: Print & Bind - November 16th for 300-700-800-3500 series. Bind only is November 26th.

ASUKA BOOK
Their web site says:
Orders for Thanksgiving:
Orders must have successfully uploaded by Noon PST October 11, 2007

Orders for Christmas:
Orders must have successfully uploaded by Noon PST November 8, 2007

ZOOKBINDERS
They wrote: “We must receive the order by Friday, November 16th for delivery by Friday December 21st.”

I’ll post more as I hear it or have time to find out.

Jason Cohen of Jason Cohen Photography took these shots of an Art Leather iMount for a design that we did last year - I’ve been meaning to pop them up in case anyone is curious what this product looks like. An iMount will have a slightly thicker gap in the center and a thin gap between the print and the page edge. Here is a link to the album design post itself.

Here are a few pages of an album that I worked on for John Riedy a while back - this bride specifically wanted a layered look - and lots of images.

Ben pulled my rubber arm a while ago and tempted me with a DVD packaging project using the JewelBoxing products. While their templates were a touch tricky to decipher at first, we came up with a packaging concept that will be easy for Ben to customize himself for each of his clients with the layered photoshop files (highly tagged and organized if I do say so myself …. hehehehe) that I provided to him. You may recognize the groom on the cover if you look closely ….. yes, that is our beloved Earl Christie and his beautiful new wife! Earl is also a client of mine, so I feel particularly excited about sharing this with you today. Many happy DVD’s to you Ben … and many happy years of wedded bliss to you Mr. & Mrs. Christie!

Thank you Ben for sharing your snaps of these! All photos are courtesy of Ben Chrisman Photography.

Front of jewel case

Back of jewel case

Inside - showing inside back of booklet - and DVD

Inside - opened up booklet

This week I worked with Jen (Jennifer S Rau Photography) on her 5×5 trifold promo card. She wanted to feature both a variety of wedding shots as well as couple shots - target audience: high end coordinators. Thanks Jen! Can’t wait to see it printed!

front

inside panels

partially open with front flap closed

outside panels

back

What can I say about Olivier …. what a cute little puddin’ pop!!! Monique of Studio Iris (Montreal, Quebec) so kindly offered this fun project for me to work on and I have to say I enjoyed every minute of it! Just wait til Olivier is 16 and his mum brings out this book to show his friends …. hehehehehe

I thought it would be fun to start a map to show where our HappyFish ohana is spreading to! I’ll admit, this little map is kind of fun to make recently some old high school friends coerced me to join ‘facebook’ which I did reluctantly … but sort of glad that I did because I’ve reconnected with some very old friends who I haven’t seen since the late 80’s! :0 Anyway, there is a map application that you can click on and it highlights locations. Once you start it’s hard to stop!

I worked with the talented Melisa Conde of ALTARE Wedding Photojournalism (El Salvador) recently on their first portfolio style album. This book was the Asuka EX. Portfolio ‘best of’ albums are always a challenge to get a mixed selection of images with many different weddings and couples … to flow nicely in one book. She gave me a selection of her favorite shots and told me to pick and choose what I felt was right. I was so pleased when I received this note from Melisa when she received her book from Asuka:

I just wanted to let you know our Asukabook just arrived and it looks spectacular!!!! We are so happy with it and can’t wait to start making them for our clients!! The EX Laminate was definitely the way to go, it’s so elegant! Thanks for the advice Thank you very much Karen, you did a GREAT job with everything, the design looks even better in print (which is hard to imagine since it already looked spectacular on screen!!)

Thanks again!!!

Melisa Conde
ALTARE Wedding Photojournalism

Here is a sampling of a few pages:

For more information about HappyFish Design please visit www.happyfish.com.

This, I think, one of my favorite albums that I’ve worked on with Meg & Charles (Meg Baisden Photography.) I’ll have to post some others that I adore … but in the meantime … here are a few pages for our latest beach wedding for Brandy & Russell. Brandy has the most amazing eyes - pair that up with the colors of the sand and water … perfect color scheme! BTW … Meg & Charles have a great blog - they are great writers as well as shooters.