This morning I went to Fed Ex to ship the CD master, another CD with the graphics files, color proofs, and a deposit check to National Tape and Disc.

It’s amazing to me, but not really surprising, how all that stress and overly-focused anxiety has just melted away, and how I’ve regained perspective, remembering that the important thing is that this album show the beauty of the coming of Christ. I slept well last night.

Doing the graphics was a pretty amazing experience. I wish I’d allotted more time to it, especially considering I had no experience with PhotoShop.

The stripped-down program that came with my scanner is also an Adobe product, and I’d just assumed PhotoShop would do all the same things the same way, just with extra features and tools I wouldn’t need to worry about.

Oh no. Very different products, so a lot of my design time was figuring out how to do things.

I learned how to use some of the cool features PhotoShop has that PhotoDeluxe doesn’t, like writing text on a curved path for the CD imprint, adjusting kerning and leading to space text horizontally and vertically the exact way I wanted it in the booklet, using “Curves” to adjust the color of a photo more precisely than I could with other color adjustment tools, and modifying a selection to make it smoother or smaller.

Eric Hause helped me learn my way around, and Christi Sobel helped me with a lot of the scanning and image work.

One particular challenge was that the original artwork, a beautiful collage by my college friend Andrea Seavers, uses a textured paper for Mary’s and Jesus’ skin. That paper didn’t scan well, so Christi used various tools to smooth out the texture and even out the color. I made the final adjustments last night and had color proofs made at Kinko’s, so everything would be ready to ship this morning.

Whew!

I can’t say enough about the folks at Electric Wilburland.

Calm and assured, kind and patient and generous, easygoing and humorous, not to mention highly skilled, Matt and Will have made this project a fantastic experience. Matt’s engineering has been thoughtful, sensitive, attentive both to details and to context; he’s also given helpful feedback and suggestions throughout the process. And both of them have given me confidence when I was too far gone to think anymore.

Thanks, guys; you’re the best.