Parent company Magicomm makes Flash app do the heavy layout and print-production lifting to create high-quality keepsakes.A decade ago, preparing PDFs with shadows, transparency and silhouetted graphics for print output was the sole purview of highly paid QuarkXPress jockeys in high-tech studios.
Now, a new business model brings that kind of design firepower to stay-at-home moms (demographers abbreviate them SAHMs) cooking up family scrapbooks—a thoroughly modern melding of the old photo album and the even older memory book.
Photoalbum.com—a new site launched by Magicomm—hopes to capitalize on the scrapbooking craze by bringing a digital twist to the hobby. That's not an easy task, as the best scrapbooks feature handmade touches and artful layouts. But Magicomm is taking the sophisticated business concept of variable-data printing and applying it to a non-technical market populated by moms doing crafts in their spare time.
"The stuff that goes into scrapbooking is pretty much equal to the stuff that goes into desktop publishing," says Photoalbum.com founder David Lewis. "But it's a target market of one. On-demand printing, variable-data printing, this is the epitome of that. We'll fill 20 pages of the most sophisticated artwork I've ever seen...and we'll print one copy of that."
Yet, says Magicomm's Michael Jahn, director of product innovation and veteran of the PDF print-workflow wars, PDF allows for all that to be built in. Flash is so closely integrated with PDF that Jahn's company could create a simple page-layout app that SAHMs can use to create graphics that only experienced designers could produce just a few short years ago—and then export those layouts to PDF/X, an international print-output standard.
Better yet, it keeps the work and the software in an online workspace where scrapbookers can access their photos, layouts and other elements of their projects from any Web-connected computer, using a login name and password.
"[Our] Flash-based tool set can run without additional install in most of the popular Web browsers," Jahn says. "Many people share computers, some people are not allowed or have the technical savvy to install software on the computer that is available to them. Flash provides a wonder-path to access this group of users."
It's a big market. According to Creating Keepsakes and Craftrends, a trade publication, 26 million—or one quarter of U.S. households—participate in scrapbooking. In some households, more than one person does it, accounting for 32.1 million scrapbookers. Jahn adds that scrapbookers, on average, spend almost $3,000 annually on their craft.
Some scrapbookers, Lewis and Jahn have found, use the digital scrapbooking tool to create whole books that stand on their own. Others, they say, create base layouts and embellish them by hand after Photoalbum.com ships them.
"They work with shadows, and it gives their work a rich, three-dimensional look," says Lewis, who figures his is the only online photo album that outputs to PDF—most, if not all others, create JPEG images of each album page. "We've built support for that in our design tool, so that they can create these buttons and bows and all kinds of artwork pieces with drop shadows."
