No More Secrets

Here is the final result of about 4 months of secrets. It is a giant copy of The Family A Proclamation to the World, surrounded by family pictures. My Dad asked Brandon and me to make this for my Mom for their 25th Wedding Anniversary.

His original idea was to take a large copy of the Proclamation and then put pictures around it. He even had the frame ready. The frame was currently around a painting from the Inn at Temple Square. None of us really liked the picture. I pretended that I wanted the pic up in my apartment and my Mom gladly let me have it. Once we had the frame at home Brandon and I took it apart.

We decided to retype the Proclamation and print it out with the picture border. We decided to change the orientation from Portrait to Landscape. We spent quite a while finding the correct looking font and laying all the text out almost exactly the way it looks on the original Proclamation. The first "W" was especially hard to do. It is in a very scripted font that our computer did not have. Brandon finally took a picture of the W, uploaded it into Adobe Illustrator and traced it.

For the pictures we decided that it would be best if everybody picked out there own pictures. That way they wouldn't be upset by a picture they personally didn't like. We told my siblings that we needed 4 pictures of each of them. We wanted the pictures to be a good representation of my parents 25 years together so we asked for 1 baby picture, 1 little kid pic, 1 pic of an accomplishment, and 1 current pic. We also had room for a current family picture and 1 picture of Rocklond. We put a picture of my parents on their wedding day in the middle of the Proclamation.

We did a quick preview so that my Dad and my siblings could see what it was going to look like. Here is the preview. After getting every ones input and a few more pictures we were able to start laying it out for real. We hooked our laptop up to the TV and used it as a second monitor to edit on. This was nice because we both could see the picture easily.

Here I am editing.

Here is what it looked like on the TV (That dark line really isn't there. I guess taking a picture of a TV screen with a camera causes that line)

Here are the two monitors. I have two monitors at work and I LOVE them. The little screen has the preview layout on it and the big screen has the official layout.

Here is the final preview. Brandon created the texture for the part that the words are printed on by taking a picture of granite and then coloring it yellow. We printed the picture out using a 36 inch printer on Campus. Then we framed it. Yesterday we took it to the Hotel that my parents were staying in for their business trip/ anniversary celebration. Brandon snuck in the picture while I distracted my Mom. He had a blanket over it so my Mom had to take off the blanket before she could see what it was. She was very happy to see it. She kept saying, its all our favorite pictures in one place.

I'm glad she likes it and I am also glad that I don't have to worry about spilling the beans any more. 4 months is a long time for me to keep a secret.