Ysiad

I just made the first version of a gift certificate for Alabaster & Chess. The gift certificate is a pdf file made on a mac. I did it manually this time and it took about an hour and a half including time spent thinking about the look and how to actually generate the file. Here are the steps I took:

1. Save the Alabaster & Chess logo as a png file somewhere on my computer
2. Add the Alabaster & Chess logo to iphoto
3. Select the logo and click the “Make a Card” button on the lower right
4. Select the photo card template
5. Set the front page template to use a design that had a large center column
6. Select the “fit photo to area” option
7. Typed up some text in the various text areas
8. Output to pdf
9. Add some more text with the gift certificate information to what would correspond to the back of the image page
10. Save the inner set of pages as a psd file
11. Open the psd file in Gimp
12. Rotate the text 180 degrees in Gimp
13. Delete a couple of dark lines that materialized by painting them white
14. Print the modified image as a pdf
15. Save the outer set of pages as a psd file
16. Open that psd file in gimp
17. Print it as a pdf without making any modifications
18. Open the outer set of pages in preview
19. Enable the sidebar in preview
20. Drag the inner set of pages pdf file onto the outerset on the sidebar
21. Save the resultant pdf file

I think these steps could be done in approximately 15 minutes going forward. Especially since now all I have to do is modify the text on the inner set of pages. So I’m thinking that it just makes sense for me to handle this manually for now. I can switch to a programmatic approach if it starts looking like we’ll need to print out more than 32 of these (assuming it’ll take me about 8 hours to write a program that does this for us).