---

Minted is a marketplace crowdsourced by a large public community of designers. Designs are sourced from the community, then published to the site as templates. Customers pick design templates, personalize them, and the in-house production team polishes the designs and sends them to print. Minted begain with greeting cards then eventually moved into the wedding market and various other print product offerings.

During my 6 years at minted, I took on many roles, all in the interest of producing quality print products. As a production associate, I contributed to maintaining the design template inventory on web for the developers. During my time as a design associate, I helped clients by proofing their personalize designs through copy adjustments, photo editing, custom requests, and consultation. As time went, I moved into quality control, where I inspected printed deliverables and gave feedback to improve our print process. Then as a design lead, my focus was geared toward workflow optimization and production designer improvement. My last role at minted involved taking a deeper focus into the productivity and quality of our production design team. I studied how our production designers worked and provided visibility into efficiency and opportunities for improvement. 

***disclaimer: I did not create or produce the designs shown below

Baby Announcements

︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ Written content often exceeded the allotted space and would therefore overlap other element spaces like artwork or photography sections of the design. In cases like these, elements would need to be adjusted, moved around, and even rescaled

︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ At times, clients would request large deviations from original design templates, asking to incorporate more photos than originally supported, custom artwork, and changing a layout that was designed in a portrait orientation to landscape. Understandably, this can have a dramatic impact on the ragging, and therefore leading and margins needed to be reworked.

︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ When clients submitted their personalized designs, they did so with no access to typography tools. In many instances, kerning adjustments were required. In many instances, clients deviated from the template typefaces and went with script, but in all uppercase, which discrupts the connection points of headers and tails.

︎︎ The most common personalizations that our design team had to advise and adjust, were typeface deviations. While our intention is to honor the spirit of the original crowd sourced templates, some clients were staunch on their decisions. Different typefaces have different affects on the feel and success of a design layout, and thus require type size adjustments, and a menu of other adjustments.

︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎︎ Prior to the presence of Ai tools and enhanced features of photoshop or similar apps, I felt that fulfilling many of the requests received around 2012 required a bit of creativity. It was common to use terms like workaround, or ‘trick photoshop’, but this really meant that our actions in the programs had to leverage specific sequences. 

︎︎︎︎︎ On many occasions, requests to remove people from photos, clear blemishes, restore 50 year old degraded scans, sharpen low resolution imagery, and everything under the sun were regular. It was also common for us to extend the content of a photo using just the existing information.