This Monday marks Joella’s first full month on earth. I can’t believe it’s been thirty-one days since the delivery at the hospital.
Those were fun days. No, not because I get to sleep in a patient bed. Those beds were so darn narrow I thought I would’ve fallen flat on the floor if I moved my fat ass even an inch off. No, those weren’t fun.
What really were was the fact that many people dropped by to say hi and pay our new family a visit. Most also gave positive wishes and hopes for our future (see the First Wishes video series on Joella’s website). We really appreciated all of them, especially those who took an extra effort to come to the hospital, which was relatively located far on the edge away of the city.
My in-laws wanted to send out greeting cards and novelty gifts to these fine folks as a small token of appreciation, which I completely thought was well-deserved. Of course, geeky dad here gets a part to play with, too! Instead of buying generic, we decided to make a custom card and print them as glossy photographs.
So upstairs I went and selected a few shots from Aperture. I had nearly 1,000 baby-related photos by now, so it wasn’t very difficult. Priscila’s initial idea was to have a photo collage of several shots in the card.
This is one of those requests where I admittingly miss my old Windows-based PC. Back then I used Picasa for photo management, and it was really easy to create collages. Of course, recently Picasa was also made available for the Mac, but I’ve gotten used to a new workflow in Aperture (iPhoto just doesn’t cut it) that I couldn’t be bothered switching back. Not to mention the iPod sync.
By Googling, I found and downloaded Shape Collage. This is a great product and its free version was good enough for what we needed. I played around with it and made a heart-shaped collage, which Priscila really liked. A bit of customization later, my first draft (DRAFT1) was produced.
Which.. didn’t turn out very well. The collage had 50 pictures, so Joella was hardly recognizable in ANY of them.
My second draft took care of that. Instead of having the collage as the main object, it served as the background and filled the whole card (all hundreds of photos!). Yes, nobody could recognize anything, but that’s beside the point. A few shots of cute Joella became the focal attraction, and I hand-painted the words “Joella’s 1st Year Month” into it using a thick brush, with the painted area ‘revealing’ the collage behind.
The idea really looked awesome in my head a few minutes before. But, would you believe, given form it turned out really ugly and amaterish. Like someone spitted on a canvas and used a leg to write on it. Thus, DRAFT2 was thrown down the can as well.
So I threw away the hand paint and found a really elegant font in Zapfino. After the change and a bit styling, things seemed to click and gave me a good feeling. It looked sophisticated, clean, and sat well side-by-side with the pictures next to it. DRAFT3 was my eureka moment of the day.
Some details were then added, and you know you’re a geek when you just instinctively typed down a website URL before the actual names of people. Anyway, we printed out several copies of FINAL, ready for distribution on Monday.
If you happen to get one of these in the mail, please know that we love you so much, and these cards were created with my most sincere gratitude. That, and also the hope that you wouldn’t throw them away the first minute you get it! 
