Gibber-gabber
What’s a Christmas card emergency you might ask?
beingzoe about 4 years ago

I was torn whether to post this in Tell us about your day at work or in Shop Talk. It could be any industry, any job, any time. For me it was the Christmas card emergency.

Projects and clients often wait until the last minute to be complete things, but this was my special holiday treat to bear. It is 11 o’clock in the morning, I am just sitting down to prepare for a meeting I had at 1 o’clock (speaking of last minute), when I get a call from another client asking me to help finish their Christmas card. I thought no big deal, take the info, and I’ll call back later to get the details. Unfortunately the card was supposed to be at the printer by 12 o’clock.

Apparently they had the company photo taken a week or two earlier and they were going to have their IT guy whip up a Christmas card for them. This is problem number one. IT folk are great, the modern world couldn’t live without them, but these people do not design anything unless it is data flow and security infrastructure. So like all good companies trying to save a buck (that’s everybody, myself included), they ask the IT guy to design the card. The IT guy waits until the day before it is due, conveniently on a day where the Christmas card project manager is out, and leaves it in her inbox. Problem number two. Most high resolution print jobs are too big to be sent via email. In this case, the final pdf files, front and back, inside and out of a folded 6×4.25 greeting card weighed in at a hearty 389kb. You can print a nice looking stamp with that, I don’t care what kind of compression you are using.

So like the nice guy (i.e. traditionally referred to as sucker), I find myself preparing for a meeting, locating files on a corporate server via terminal services, downloading print house settings and templates, and designing a new card for the next hour, with the client on the phone with me half the time, as I sent quick pdf proofs for her to review.

Unfortunately I realized quickly that the composition of the photograph was making it impossible to bleed like my client wanted. I suggested using a border and sent the proofs over. This, as usual led to the 1000 more nit-picky (that’s the jaded snippy portion of me talking) tweaks and adjustments.

Then the unthinkable. I actually said that I didn’t like it but I had an idea how to fix it. But there was no way I was going to be able to do it before I left for my meeting (which I ended up being reasonably prepared for despite all of this). So we agreed that the print house could wait another couple of hours and we would finish it later in the day.

In the end the card came out beautifully with a nice clean look that didn’t look hurried at all (though I’m still waiting to see the final printing). Everybody was happy.

And that my friends is a Christmas card emergency. It has happened to all of us. Nobody did anything wrong (except maybe the IT guy :) and we are all guilty of waiting until the last minute (god knows how many times I have been staring down the copy shop clerk as they tell me, “NO, I can’t make 1000 sets of that document and those color prints in the next 2 minutes.”

NOTE: Some facts and names have been changed to protect the innocent. But more so because the real story was so much more complex, convoluted, and drawn out that I don’t think I could have kept your attention, or stomached writing the whole story. Oh and the image I have included is believed to be one of the first mass-produced Christmas cards in existence. I found it via google images at SMU.edu . Which was kind of interesting unto itself, so thanks again Christmas card emergency.

merry day.