allen mueller

Last Minute Gifts cover - composite

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I came up with the idea of creating a candy cane shape liked the Bloomingdale’s “b” I then wanted to shoot it in an environment used for some things that were in the book. We shot a candy cane seperate from the background and then I built the composite in photoshop. If we had more time I would have had edible miniatures of these produced for hand-outs during the sale - oh well… When the cover art was ‘done’ I was stuck in my seat going “Be what?” Copywriter Betty Emry placed the cherry on top - the word “gifted”, which completes the phrase “Be gifted”.

some of the Bloomingdale’s catalogs I've worked on...

From June 2004 to September 2006, I worked on over 37 Bloomingdale’s catalogs. These catalogs were assembled by 2-3 people all sharing the design and production responsibilities, while a crew of photographers and stylists worked in seperate studios and locations to style and shoot photography.

Memorial Day '05

A cover that required extensive production time…

Big Brown Bag Sale

This is the 2005-2008 design for Bloomingdale’s BigBrownBagSale I created this design, and then it was used quarterly for this sale, with the word ‘sale’ changing color every time.

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Layered from several images on different-colored backgrounds, the figures are silhouetted and set into a different environment. Responsible for all of the photohop and layout work for this book's fashion. I really enjoy working on fashion photography.

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Typical busy work (comps) We would say, “Let’s do a Silver & Gold story.” Then we would go through reams of magazines to find products similar to those sold by Bloomingdale’s and bring them together for a new merchandising story. THE THEORY BEING that the buyers would then be ‘inspired’ by the resulting design to turn in a similar array of merchandise for a spread in the next catalog.

The reality was a different thing all together.

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When I worked on Bloomingdale’s, about 40% percent of what I did was image work. These images needed a good bit of processing. Paths for silhouettes are carefully-drawn paths, not selections that have been converted into jaggy, pixelated paths. Shadows are black plate only, fading completely to white. Problems colors are corrected - metals, whites, blacks all properly desaturated/saturated. Colors are matched to merchandise. Sometimes props are added or removed, colors are changed, etc. Sometimes this was the only work I could enjoy, because everyone always responded positively to it.

typical product photo adjustments

Most photos need a little bit of adjustment and cleanup. I draw paths for silhouetting the product and sometimes additional paths for selective color adjustments and merchandise matching. (fine tuning for merch-match happens at the press.) I then clean up the inevitable dust, sratches and other minutae. Sometimes the photos have to be excessively manipulated, but I never leave a trace of the work I've done. A perfect job is completely undetectable, unless it's been compared to the original, as above.