I believe that a photograph that is not printed is incomplete. An image that is not printed is sentenced to death on a hard drive somewhere, or buried in an endless stream of snapshots on a tiny phone screen. Given the alternatives, death is bad. In many cases, a single print, however wonderful, does not tell a complete story. This is where a proper album comes into play, and to solve that problem, we have Fundy Designer.
I am well aware of book making tools, and even the ability to send straight from Lightroom to Blurb. These are good, but for custom layouts and themes, there is a fair bit of manual work to be done. For some, this construction is part of the experience and is well loved. For others, particularly professionals who need to make every minute count so they can invest time in growing their business, album construction requiring a lot of manual effort is time lost forever.
The whole idea behind Fundy Designer is that it accelerates and simplifies the creation of albums and books. You do not need to be a layout artist, you simply need the ability to choose from a wide selection of templates and layouts and pick that which suits your subject. What deserves an album? Whatever you want, but here are some ready examples; a wedding, an engagement, an anniversary, a family meet up, a graduation, a vacation, a new birth. The list goes on and on.
Some people say that younger folks don't care about prints and albums, that they live for the second and if its not on the Internet, it's a waste. Perhaps, but my real world experience is different. Put an album into someone's hands and they will actually look at the images, not just flip the pages, like some endless gallery on a tablet. They spend time on the images, exploring and discovering. Much the same as any other person would.
In fact, given how mobile we are today, and how small the world has become, the need for print and albums is actually greater than ever. Enough proselytizing, let's look at why Fundy Designer may be perfect for you as a creative.
Fundy Designer is the brainchild of Andrew Funderburg. It is software that runs on Windows and Mac OS. Licensing is simple. You download a trial from fundydesigner.com and install it. There are numerous online tutorials to make it very easy to get started and the more you dig, the more power that you discover. When you are ready to buy, you purchase a license at the level that fits your needs, Suite Lite, Suite Pro or Studio Suite Pro. My review and evaluation is based on a licensed version of Fundy Designer Suite Pro.
The software is extremely well designed to help you to focus on the build and not on the technical. You can start your design in one of four modules. They are Album, Gallery, Collage, and Image Brander. To make photos available for your project, you drag and drop them to the images bar from your computer. This could not be much simpler.
Let's go through the process to make an album. First you decide how you want the album made, through Fundy Direct, managed entirely by Fundy for you, via preparation of files for partner labs, or through a completely custom design.
In my example, I am making a book, so chose the Signature Book option. Note that a partner may have many more options than appear in Fundy Direct. If you want a different option, you would choose Design & Export on the first screen
Since I am using Fundy Direct, I pick a cover style. The panel on the left shows the available options, but you do not select the option here. That can be a bit confusing. In this example, there is only one cover type to pick.
The first time you make these choices, it's not quick, because there are many options, and not sufficient context sensitive help to move you along. For this reason, I strongly recommend watching the online tutorials at the Fundy site before you do each step. Once you have done this a few times, the album basic creation goes very quickly.
At this point, you fill the image well with all the potential