JET Album Design Process
The goal with JET album design service is for our clients to have their bridal albums within 90 days. We've found that happy clients with beautiful albums in their hands soon after their wedding tend to best and most productive form of advertising ever! The purpose of the JET Design Process is to get a beautiful, impressive bridal album into your hands, as soon as possible, as easily as possible. When your wedding is over, you'll want to move on with the rest of your life. Messing around with yet another aspect of your wedding after it's over isn't fun. That's why we make it as quick and as simple on you as possible.
We are so excited about the JET album design process because it is uniquely ours. It's something we've been developing since 2008. What we wanted to do was to continue making custom layouts in house but do it in such an efficient manner that we could cut down on the time that it took to make an album layout. Our goal was to be able to show our clients their first layout within a couple of weeks of their wedding. This became a reality for most weddings in 2010.
“Very, very happy” and “Really impressed” is what we heard from our clients about the album layout. We know we must be doing something right because our clients are asking for fewer changes in their layouts and making it through the design process much faster than ever before. This has resulted in albums being delivered much closer to the wedding date, and the overall happiness level with our clients has skyrocketed!
2011 weddings can expect even more than ever before. Every layout we do is custom, we do start with a blank canvas, but the efficiencies of the layout process have granted us the ability to make more and more complex layouts as time goes on. The albums in 2011 will be the best we've ever made.
The JET Design Process
How does it work, what can you expect?
Getting to know your style
We had a bride tell us that she wasn't to be photographed without makeup on and she went to a studio that told her that this was such an important part of the wedding day that they had to do it. We said “no problem.” We have many different directions we can go in the album design process and thus the crucial first step before even think about album design is that we need to know what our clients want. What do they love? What do they not care for? As our clients look through our albums we take notes about the things they did or did not like in the albums they looked over. This helps not only with the album design but the wedding photography as well.
The Wedding Day
Part of our secret of making a good wedding album is that album design starts on the wedding day. The most obvious thing is that we don't waste our clients time in taking images that they don't want in general and specifically in their album. Part of the other thing that is magical is that sometimes when we are shooting we can get an idea for a layout and shoot in a manner to make it a reality. The intial design happens so soon after the wedding that this idea is still fresh in our minds as we do the layout.
The worst thing to ever happen in a design layout is not having enough good images to make a good layout. Because we understand that three extra minutes at the wedding can save three hours of work in album production we are much more concerned about making sure we “got it” before we leave the wedding. The better problem to have is to have too many good images and deciding which good ones have to make the cut.
Image Processing
When the wedding is over we go through all the images, fix the colors and the densities, do some basic image enhancement, pull out the bad ones and rename the files. Out of 2000 images from a wedding 40 may be from the ceremony entrance. Our clients can find these 40 images nearly instantly because of how we name our files. We make the process simple to find the exact files during the wedding day because we break the wedding day down into 14 different parts that are simple to identify. Since the files are color balanced they get great images when they need to make prints .
Image Selection
This is the make or break it part of the album design process. If we select the wrong images the album is difficult to put together. If we select the right ones the album nearly builds itself. Its hard to put an exact number on it but it seems like around 85% of the time our clients are happy with the images selected in their album. The ones that don't work stand out like sore thumbs and they can easily find the better choices to replace the images. We make this process simple because we have a written form explaining the process they get when they first see their layout.
Album Design
Our albums are designed around the images we select. This is different than the way that a lot of people design their albums. Each page is a custom layout because we first select the images than design the layout around the imags.
We have so much we can tell you about the album design process because we put a lot of time and attention into it. We take pride in our albums design and feel that good ones get shown and shared with a lot of enthusiasm. Everything about the layout is something we build in house from scratch, thus there isn't one thing we will have a problem changing.
Your Own Private Website
When we design your first layout we will host it on a private website. We’ll pass along the address to you and you can share it with whoever you would like. This makes it easy to share with your parents even if they live out of state or out of the country. Each change on the layout will generate a new website. We do this so that it’s easy to compare layouts with previous versions. When you are comfortable with the layout we will do our final retouching and forward the final version on to you for your approval. 
What can be more simple? No meetings to plan for, no driving to and from appointments, and you can make changes any time of the day or night. We also make it easy for others to jump in and give their input.