Custom Wall Calendars, Part Three

We showed the two calendars to various friends. Most seemed to prefer the Ofoto calendar with its professional binding and nice packaging.

On Sunday, Dan and I got around to looking at the color print quality in detail, examining the two calendars with a magnifying glass and comparing them to the original JPEG's as displayed on my color-calibrated powerbook display.

Both calendars overemphasized reds and yellows; I wonder if this is intended to make family snapshots look warmer? Also, both calendars exhibited vertical banding, especially evident in low-contrast backgrounds.

In the end we slightly preferred the Ofoto calendar, but really expected Ofoto to do a better job of color management.

I used each website's support section to write to customer support complaining about the red shift and asking for a copy of their printer's color profile. Cafepress never wrote back at all. Ofoto wrote back to say that my images weren't of sufficiently highly resolution, which is both wrong and irrelevant.

We decided to add a third entrant to the competition, Kinko's. After a bit of wrangling, we managed to get all the images uploaded to the Kinko's site. They have a nice GUI for cropping and laying out the images. I was eventually able to order and pay for the calendar at their website, and arrange to pick it up at my nearest Kinko's store, thus saving on shipping.

Custom Wall Calendars: Part Two

Both the Ofoto and cafepress calendars arrived today via FedEx and UPS, respectively. That's two days after placing the order -- pretty impressive! The Ofoto calendar was wrapped in a plastic envelope containing a silica gel dessicant inside a cardboard box mailer; the cafepress calendar was shrink-wrapped to a corregated cardboard sheet inside a sturdy brown mailer.

First impressions -- the Ofoto calendar with its spiral binding and nice packaging seems much more professional and impressive. The cafepress calendar is larger with large, borderless photos, but its inexact folding and stapling job made it seem much less polished and professional. Also, cafepress put the cover image on upside down.

Both websites did a good job providing order status information, email updates, and links to shipper tracking information.

Custom Wall Calendars: Part One

Inspired by some stuff that my wife Mary found on the web, I decided to try to make a custom wall calendar containing twelve of my photos. Since her original inspiration came from cafepress, and since their website was pretty slick, I definitely wanted to try them. However, some disquieting comments from dissatisfied cafepress customers made me want to try at least two vendors. After looking around, I settled on Ofoto as the second contender.

I downloaded the cafepress template for wall calendars (3,450 by 2,700 at 300dpi), built a set of high-quality JPEG's using Photoshop CS with embedded sRGB color profiles, and uploaded them to both the cafepress and Ofoto websites.

When I started to create the custom calendar at cafepress, I ran into my first problem. Since my first look at cafepress's "Create & Buy (tm)" section several days earlier, the Wall Calendar ($14.99) item had disappeared from the list of Products. Only by fiddling with the URL did I get to the page that allowed me to create the Wall Calendar. An email query to cafepress concerning this oversight produced no reply.

Eventually, I uploaded all the photos to both cafepress and Ofoto. I added captions for the Ofoto calendar; cafepress expects you to format your own captions as part of the image you upload, which is both more flexible and more work.

I ordered both calendars today at midday, November 22nd, to be delivered to my house via second day delivery. Within a few hours I received email acknowledgements from both companies.

Tom Stoppard's "The Real Thing" at ACT

We went last night to see Tom Stoppard's play "The Real Thing" done by American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco. I should mention up front that I'm a huge Stoppard fan, having been won over by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival's production of "Rough Crossing" several years ago.

Like all his work, this play is self-referential and multi-layered. A play-within-a-play in the very first scene fits perfectly with the main theme of trying to work out when a relationship is The Real Thing. His use of symmetrical scenes in which lovers confront each other lends weight and rhythm to the interlocking stories of theatre people trying to make sense of their intertwingled professional and personal lives.

During the second half I was sure he was setting us up for another devastatingly sad ending as in his play "Arcadia", but instead he gives us a quiet, faintly optimistic one, hinting that Stoppard, like his playwright main character, is quite a romantic.

photo: ucsf vanpoo?

ucsf vanpoo?
Originally uploaded by Bill Walker.

I swear I did not manipulate this photo. That's what the side of the van said. Spotted in Belmont, CA turning from Old County Road onto Ralston Ave.