Mama Kat Thursday: Again And Again

Today's Mama Kat topic is:

 "Write a post that ends with the word: Again."

When I used to work at a flower shop, customers often said to me, "It must be so wonderful working with flowers all day."
In reality, that job made my clothes and hands stained & filthy, involved lifting dozens of heavy buckets of water daily, I was standing on my feet all day long and, on holidays, it was really high pressure.

Now I work at home as a graphic designer creating art for printable products for an online print-on-demand company.

On the upside: I don't have to stand on my feet all day and there's no pressure. I work when I want.

On the down side, nothing is as simple as it might appear.

There 's a learning curve involved with applying art work to these various products and getting it fitted just right; especially new products I've never tried before.
First I design the art in my graphic software, then I upload it to Zazzle, then put it on a product, then check it for fit. Sometimes it isn't quite right and I have to go back to my original design software, make adjustments, then re-load the modified design back into Zazzle and try again.

I'd say the average number of uploads it takes to get any design just right is about 7.  So the job takes both persistence and patience.

Three Photo Wedding Thank You Postcard

Which brings me to my latest frustrating learning curve: how to set up a card design that has multiple photo spaces, like this wedding card example, so the customers photos will just magically "pop" into that space when they upload them.

I discovered there is actually a little trick to sizing the sample photos in such a design for it to work properly. I'm used to my graphic software which allows me to stretch and move photos every which way, so on my first attempt with my own multi-picture postcard design, I stretched the sample photos into place. Then, I posted my design, tested it by trying to add photos and couldn't understand why it was NOT working!

Finally, I realized I had to use Zazzle's cropping tool to size my sample photos; not pushing or pulling with the mouse pointer. 

It was a fantastic "ah-ha," moment.
So, once more I uploaded my own postcard design, cropped the sample photos perfectly into place, posted it for sale, then tested it again, as if I were a customer adding photos.

It still didn't work quite right.

So, maybe I wasn't using the right setting option?
 There are 2 setting options for photos to tell them to how to fit into the design spaces: Fit or Fill.

I had already tried "Fit," but it didn't make my test photos fill the image spaces like I wanted.

So I tried "Fill" and ta-da--my test photos finally popped "magically" into the design, completely filling their spaces as they should!

I was very happy. Now I know exactly what to do! 

Unfortunately, to post my card for sale, I must reload the design onto a card, then re-load and position all the sample photos all over...again. 

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What do you have to do over and over again to get it just right?

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