When creating Fundy Direct, our main focus was to take as many pain points away from album design as possible. One of the key issues when designing an album, is collecting all of the collateral. In Fundy Designer, we have over 60 album companies and labs and thousands of sizes, but that is only part of the equation. With albums, one of the key elements is the cover template. With each album size at each lab, there may be 3-4 cover templates. And as cover options increase the number of cover templates available quickly goes into the tens of thousands.
With Fundy Direct, we wanted to simplify things. We worked with your favorite labs to present only the most popular cover options and have them loaded right in the software. Let’s take a look at how this works in Fundy Direct.
Starting an Album
The first step is to choose that you want to start a Fundy Direct Album.
Next, choose your lab or album company. This is a list that will grow a lot over the next 12-15 months. We already have 10-12 more companies committed to coming on board with Fundy Direct and more growing every day.
After choosing your album company, choose the book line you would like to print with.
Then you’ll see one of my favorite new features in the Fundy Wizard, the ability to preview the size of the album you’ll be designing. No more accidentally choosing a 9×12 vertical book when you meant to choose a 12×9 horizontal book.
This next step is where the magic begins, we have all of the supported cover types living up on our Amazon.com web server and we load them in your Fundy Designer automatically. They’ll always be up to date. And also, and this is key, we show which materials are available for each cover type.
Now you are ready to design.
Helping During The Design Process
With Fundy Direct, there is a greater partnership between Fundy Software, Inc. and your lab. So we not only know the sizes and the covers, but also minimum pages, maximum pages and page increments. For example, we know that ProDPI Press Albums, can have a minimum of 5 spreads (10 pages), a maximum of 25 spreads (50 pages) and must be made in increments of 5 spreads, or 10 pages. We keep track of all of that, and keep it displayed for you up top in your designer view.
We hope that Fundy Direct really changes the way you approach album design and ordering. Albums are an interesting product. With a good workflow they can be the single most profitable item in a studio, but they are also the most complex product a photographer can offer. We hope we can take away some of this complexity and make them more profitable.
See It In Action
Next week, we’ll show you the streamlined ordering process, direct from Fundy Designer.
