Digital Home Thoughts: Up Your DVD Presentation Game with Jewelboxing Cases and Inserts

My Geeky Back-Story
Going back a little over a decade, in-home desktop publishing (DTP) was all the rage: computing power was enough for fairly powerful layout software, greyscale hand-scanners were affordable for image capturing, and inkjet printers had almost-realistic 300 dpi photo output. I was a desktop publishing geek, volunteering my time to create newsletters and page layouts whenever possible – I had worked on my high school newspaper, back in the cut and paste days (we're talking glue here people) of the early '90s, so it came naturally to me. There was something immensely satisfying about creating something on my own time, with my own equipment, that was of remarkably higher quality than the dot-matrix, Print-Shop-era page layouts only a few years earlier. Your project only looked as good as the materials you used to create it, so back then full-colour, pre-printed paper was the secret weapon of any home desktop publisher. Forever on the quest for the coolest papers I could find, I even had a paper subscription where, monthly, I'd get sent paper samples. I kid you not – I was a hardcore teenage DTP geek (sounds like some sort of B-movie, doesn't it?).

Fast-forward a decade, and things haven't changed much: I derive tremendous satisfaction creating professional-looking photo prints, photos layouts, DVDs, CDs, etc. Amongst my friends and family, I'm known as "the wedding video guy", not so much for my camera-work (I use a Canon GL2, which is a great SD camera, but I don't shoot multi-camera), but for the quality of the final product. Always trying to up my game, to create better and better wedding DVDs, I came across the Jewelboxing Web site. They had design kits for graphic designers that included inkjet-compatible inserts, pre-scored for insertion into their high-quality plastic DVD cases, and software templates to make the process quick and easy. Since I had the wedding of a friend coming up, and I'd been asked to be the videographer, this seemed like a good opportunity to request product samples from the company.

Using Jewelboxing Products
When the product samples arrived, they didn't disappoint. The DVD jewel boxes were amazing: crystal clear, very hard plastic that felt sturdy in every way. They also featured a solid open/close mechanism that felt like it could be used hundreds of times. The matte inserts were thick, designed for double-sided printing, capable of supporting as high-quality an image as my Epson R1800 printer could output. The inserts were also impressively intricate – the jewel boxes were cut away on the front left side, exposing about half an inch of space that allowed you to see through to the inside back – and the inserts accommodated this nicely.

The software templates, on the other hand, were less impressive. Designed for people that really know what they're doing with print layouts (which isn't me), it took me several tries before I was able to get the Photoshop template to print the way I wanted. The biggest problem wasn't the templates themselves, which are provided in a variety of formats (Photoshop, Illustrator, Freehand, InDesign, Pagemaker, and QuarkXPress), it was the lack of any instructions; a terse text file in the ZIP file doesn't really count. If the Jewelboxing designers spent a bit of time creating templates that had instructions with them, with easy to see layout guides, I think they could make them much easier to use.

To be fair, they really only target design professionals, so I probably bit off more than I could chew and experienced users would probably find the templates easy to use. But hey, it's only ink right? I wasted about three templates before I got it right, and continued to tweak the layout slightly with each print, but the results were worth it. What I'd really love to see would be a template compatible with LumaPix's FotoFusion: there's some powerful synergy here because FotoFusion is an amazing tool for creating photo layouts, and with a great template the Jewelboxing people could reach out to a whole category of user.