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Too Many Cooks
by John Redhed

Years back, in one of our brainstorming sessions, Willma and I wrote down a list of Christmas traditions — the things people associate with Christmas and the holiday season. One of the items on that list was “miniature railroad around the tree,” which was our inspiration for Hall & Company’s 2006 card. In 2007, we designed a card based on the annual ritual of addressing envelopes for Christmas cards.

‘Baking Christmas cookies’ was the tradition we wanted to tackle for the 2008 card. We described our proposal to Mike Hall:

On the front of the card, one employee smiles contentedly to another as they cut out sugar cookies. On the inside of the card, we see a heartwarming kitchen scene, with joyful cooks singing Christmas carols while carefully decorating cookies (of course observing all applicable food safety guidelines). In the corner, a cute little mouse winks at the camera as he mischievously pilfers a crumb. Happily skipping across the room with a container of sprinkles, one person gives . . .

Juuuuuuuuuust kidding.

Actually, the description was more like this:

Miniature employees work on decorating giant cookies, but mostly they just goof around.

Mike’s an easy sell.

Before working on a mockup, Willma and I sat down to brainstorm: “What are all the things thirty-four tiny people could be doing as they decorate huge cookies?”

We wrote down all our ideas, then Willma started sketching:

Next was a full-blown mockup. I had Willma re-draw everything with colored pencils, with a few modifications and one addition — “Happy Holidays” written with footprints of green food coloring. I scanned those drawings into the computer, then brought them piece-by-piece into Photoshop, where I could arrange them into a pleasing layout in an 8.5x11 template.

This year we decided to mock up the card front as well. At right is our first attempt, a quick-and-dirty combination of sketch and snapshot.

As before, the goal was to ‘tease’ the inside of the card. By showing an employee with “Hall & Company Cookie Decorating Division” on his/her apron, we give a hint as to the theme, while the huge sprinkles in his/her hands signal there’s something unusual going on inside. We cropped the employee at the neck, so the focus wouldn’t be on this particular person.

When I showed this to Mike Hall and a pair of his employees, they didn’t like it. Specifically, they didn’t like the ‘headless’ employee, and more generally, having a close-up of an employee’s apron just didn’t do it for them.

In response, I did what I usually do when my ideas are shot down: I held my breath until I turned blue.

Just kidding. A person can’t survive in the graphic design business if they can’t take criticism and be a bit humble about their work. Besides, there are always several good solutions to any design problem. I told them, “No problem. I’ll come up with a better idea.”

As I’ve mentioned previously, I can’t draw worth a darn, but right then and there I grabbed a sheet of paper and started sketching an idea that had just popped into my head. I drew a door, slightly open, with a dog peeking out (that’s Huckleberry, the Halls’ dog). On the door was a sign: “Hall & Company Cookie Decorating Division.” And next to the door were a couple of aprons on hooks.

No, the sketch at right is not mine. The quality of my sketch was well below ‘chicken scratch’ but apparently just above ‘unintelligible mess,’ because the idea was approved.

Back at my office, I told Willma the first mockup had been rejected, and showed her my sketch. She was shocked, of course. “They approved your idea based on this?!”  After recovering from a fit of derisive laughter, she sat down to work on a more presentable mockup (at right).

By the way, just so it’s crystal clear, Hall & Company does not have a Cookie Decorating Division. If you’d like to learn about them, visit their website.

There were a number of things to prepare before taking photos of the employees. First, I ordered a half-dozen aprons custom-printed with the “Cookie Decorating Division” logo, and sent one to an out-of-town employee. Together with my liaison at Hall & Company, we assigned positions for each employee on the mockup. And I started gathering props that would aid in posing, such as a small balloon, a large paper cone, a broom, a 2x4, a pair of card tables, and a short stack of flattened cardboard boxes, taped together. I even cut about fifty two-inch lengths of 1" plastic pipe, as a stand-in for giant sprinkles.

Hall & Company had recently moved their headquarters to a brand-new building on an adjacent property, and their old building was not yet occupied, so I was able to set up my temporary studio there. To achieve the proper camera angle, I would be shooting from eight feet up on a ladder.

The shoot went smoothly, so apparently my preparations had been sufficiently thorough. Before I posed each person, I showed them a copy of the mockup, so they could understand why I was having them pose in such strange positions.

For the four people holding the frosting bag, I had filled a giant plastic bag with inflated balloons, to be held by each of the four as I shot them, so their arms and hands would be positioned realistically. But during photography this prop turned out to be unhelpful, so I set it aside and posed the four as best I could, knowing I could adjust arms and hands in Photoshop during compositing.

A challenge came up when a schedule conflict forced me to photograph Mike & Becky Hall at their home, on short notice, the night before they left town. I had only one light, not much space to shoot in, and worst of all, none of us had thought to bring one of the custom-printed aprons.

I realized a generic white apron could be used, and the logo added later in Photoshop, so Becky ran next door to borrow one while I set up as best I could. Unfortunately, we couldn’t locate a white apron; instead we used one with a floral pattern, turning it backwards so the pattern was less visible. At right are the two shots I got.

Bad color, hot spots, harsh shadows — almost the full gamut of photography no-nos. And the apron was so wrinkled it was unusable.

The statement, “Don’t worry about it; we’ll fix it in Photoshop,” is overused and abused by some in the photography business. Often it’s much quicker (i.e., cheaper) to take a few extra minutes during the shoot and get the photo right the first time. But in this case I didn’t have much choice.

After an hour in Photoshop fixing shadows and lighting, I took copies of aprons from two of the other employee photos, and carefully began fitting them to Mike and Becky using Photoshop’s Liquify feature. This is a tool that lets you push areas of a photo around as if they were silly putty — perfect for re-shaping the aprons to fit their new owners. Of course, lighting and shadows had to be adjusted as well, and unfortunately Photoshop doesn’t yet have a tool labeled “Magically Add Lighting and Shadows To New Aprons.”

It was a lot of work. Next time, I’ll remember the !@#$% apron.

A more enjoyable challenge was working on the frosted employee. Aime was quite relieved to learn we weren’t actually going to slather her in frosting, as it might have resulted in a death threat from the dry cleaner. At right is the photo of her, one of my daughter’s dolls carefully ‘painted’ with red and green frosting, some squiggly yellow frosting on the back of a measuring spoon, and some gumdrops.

This is where extensive experience with Photoshop comes in handy. If one doesn’t know the tools well, certain design solutions won’t come to mind, or if they do, they might be discarded as impossible or impractical.

In this case, even though I had no previous experience frosting employees, I knew for a fact that I could throw these four photos in a Photoshop pot, mix ’em around, and turn them into . . .

. . . this:

It’s funny how these things go. A casual observer would naturally assume that the photos of Mike & Becky were easy, and the frosted person was difficult. C’est la vie.

I won’t detail all the challenges of photographing props and adjusting them to fit the people, as this page is already approaching novel length. Suffice to say it was very exacting work, and thus very time-consuming.

One item I should note: after experimenting with food-coloring footprints, I decided not to use them to write the “Happy Holidays” greeting, as the words just weren’t looking good enough. Instead, I had Willma write the greeting with frosting (she writes more attractively with frosting than I do with a pen). I still wanted to use the footprints, though, and as you can see in the completed image, I figured something out.

The card front looks like it was fairly simple to create. Take a picture of somebody’s office door, use Photoshop to add in the dog and the logo, and boom, you’re done, right?

Not quite. As usual, I had a very clear picture in my head of what I wanted, and achieving that turned into a much bigger task than I anticipated.

After scouting offices at Hall & Company and several other companies, I still hadn’t found the right look for the door, wall and floor. So I gave up the notion of photographing it myself, and started hunting online for stock photos.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, three hours of searching didn’t turn up what I was looking for, but I found one photo of a door and another of a floor and wall, which could be modified satisfactorily in Photoshop.

As you can see from the composite, I had to make some major modifications to the door (including changing it from closed to slightly open), but the result was, in my extremely humble opinion, worth the effort.

But as I sat at my computer that day late in November, staring at this image, I was vaguely dissatisfied. It took a while to figure out what it was, but finally I concluded the scene lacked a cue to the unconventional nature of what was behind the door. Yes, the dog with the hat was a bit unusual, but I wanted something more specific, without giving everything away.

Thankfully, it took only a few minutes to come up with a solution, and only a few minutes more to execute it.

Here’s what I added:

Last on the agenda was the letter for the back of the card.

My first draft was written on OSHA letterhead, but I decided I’d rather not learn the hard way that doing so was a federal offense. So instead I created a new federal agency. Much better.

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