Calendar Publication

Following a very limited experiment last year, this year I decided (under much persuasion) to attempt to create a good quality calendar of Icelandic images, purely for family & friends.

My first attempt was through Lulu. This is a US web-based self publication service which includes services for book printing and calendars amongst others. It seemed ok, even after visiting the forums where there was a fair amount of complaining. Having done plenty of pre-press work in the past, it seemed that preparing photos for print on their digital printer would be feasible.

Lulu provides a couple of lightly customisable calendar templates, to which users can upload photos. The system is not very user friendly, and requires far more fiddling than it should do. Customer support is also very poor, with customers (paying customers that is) being largely fobbed off to the forums. At the prices Lulu charges, this is pretty bad.

Cover for the "lulu" calendar

Of course, the most important thing is the quality. Well, at nearly $30 a copy (and double that for shipping, in some cases), it is really bad. The paper is horrible, an off-white stock (described as "white") with a quite inappropriate texture and the coil binding does not have a hook (the pages are perforated for hanging, which defeats the point of coil binding). Print colour is ok, quite a close match to my prooofing, but shadows up to at least 10% are muddy and detail-free (despite a shadow threshold of 12), and there are nasty vertical streaks on most pages. Very amateur and certainly not worth half the price. One plus point, the packaging is robust and secure.

Interior page from the "lulu" calendar

I was ready to give up at this point, but at the last moment heard from a friend about XPress Printing, a digital printing service in Romania. In this case, it is print & print only - although they do offer a design service. So I had to do a very fast design using Adobe InDesign, and uploaded a 30Mb PDF for them to print. They provided excellent support and could answer all questions I put to them, immediately and with no hesitation.

Cover page for the final calendar

The printed calendars arrived a few days later. The quality is fantastic, at under $10 a copy, on very nice paper. They are coil-bound, and have been very well received. The packaging was not so good, but the second batch was better. I'm not sure if the people at Xpress speak English, but I think they do - they are well worth getting in touch with if you need printing services like this, but do be aware you need to know what you're doing. They will just print whatever you send!

Interior page from the final calendar

All of the photos were taken with the Olympus E-1, except for the cover, with is an Xpan image. The rush job resulted in two errors, a typo in an Icelandic title, and somehow ending up with "01.2006" for August - which took quite a while for anyone to spot (grazie Stefano!).

We had 30 printed. We have got a few spares, so if anybody out there is interested, I'll be happy to send you one (if you ask in time) against the price of postage.