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Just about a decade ago, a friend of mine went out to the San Fernando Valley to help a friend in failing health who had a company which had developed, and now produced and sold a whole line of herbal medications to alternative medical practitioners. He did not return.

His friend's business was left in a particularly awkward transitional state. By that time, the company had been running, with a degree of success for about 18 years, but no one had ever gotten around to sorting the business end of it out in such a manner that the records would have been coherent enough to withstand any sort of official scrutiny had the necessity ever come up. He had finally, belatedly made a start on that process. His death, consequently, left matters even more wildly incoherent than ever. His family had no wish to open this particular can of worms.

My friend, not knowing what he was letting himself in for, stepped into the breech.

He had no practical experience in running an operating business either, and the past decade has been a bumpy ride, which, after a number of wrong turns and cul-de-sacs in the move from analog to digital finally seems to be drawing to the end of this particular phase of the company's history.

One of the issues which emerged in the drive to full accountability was the need to bring the company's product labels into compliance with FDC regulations.

This is where I got pulled into the vortex and embarked upon the Project from Heck.

We ended up spinning our wheels for some months before the project could properly launch, since, first we needed to know just what the specific regulations for products of the specific type the company produced were. And of course from that end of this particular tunnel nobody involved in the project knew quite what they were doing.

That the label element of the project was completely entangled in a concurrent attempt to streamline and improve the management of inventory and to create a coherent company-wide reference system did not help to expedite matters.

Well it was a "very pretty problem". My end of the Project was the easy one. I was strictly involved in the label design. This was sufficiently complex, since each roughly 3"x6" label had to fit into the the space the FDC-specified supplement facts panel, a list of the FDC specified cautions on the use of the product ingredients, where applicable, the front panel identifying the product (both name and product number), company logo and contact info. All typography in the FDC-required information also needed to fall with in an FDC-specified range of point sizes. There were also th tincture labels which needed to accompany the dry herbal blends. These also had to be created.

Plus, we wanted it all to look good.

This series of instructional photos for the Monastary of Herbs website shows how to fill the capsules if you choose not to take the tinctures directly (some taste a bit nasty). I kind of overdid the outer glow on the filled capsules. The idea was to make them show up clearly. Did not intend to imply that they light up.

It wasn't until December that we had enough of the ducks in a row for me to start putting it all together. And, of course, this hit a few bumps when something in either the reference, or the inventory end of the equation dictated changes. And, as you might expect, the checking process once I had the first versions ready was a nightmare.

Finally, my end of it came together. Their end of the team managed to give me the corrections for all of the labels and there was no further reason to put off my going out to the Monastery for the weekend and putting in the necessary drudgery of porting the files over from my traveling drive to the Dell in the herb room.

I figured that porting over 423 files would take all weekend, too. I was wrong.

I underestimated.

The major problem was that FreeHand MX on the Dell will not link files automatically. On the Mac, if I had a file with a lot of placed TIFF files and moved them from the

first disk to another, the first time I open a file it will ask where the TIFFs are. In that case one navigates to the folder where the TIFFs live and check the box that tells the program to check this folder for the missing links and select the first one, and it automatically will link to all of them.

On the Dell, it ignores the check-box. Completely. Or at least it ignores it on that Dell. Which meant that I had to link every instance of every TIFF. Some of which required linking the same TIFF to a single file up to 28 times.

While the computer thought about it. And when I was finished with that, I had to update the fonts in every file since the last time those files had been opened they had been on a Macintosh.

And, then, just to be obnoxious, about every 10-20 files or so, the bloody program would decide to claim it had found an unknown instruction and refuse to open the file after I had just gotten through linking all the TIFFs and updating all the fonts. Which required quitting out of FreeHand and relaunching.

Which wouldn’t have been so bad, except that I was also printing out these files as I finished with them and every time I relaunched the program I would lose my color settings and have to try to remember to reset them. Or everything went screwy with color shifts.

And then we discovered that some of them hadn’t ported over quite smoothly and I had a slew of those stupid missing character symbols that I had to go back and delete. And then the next day it turned out that the proofreader hadn’t really understood what I was asking for and had not been porfreading them correctly, so we found we had a lot of wandering hyphens and all kinds of other screwiness where the text had squirmed and twitched in the transition and I had to go back and correct all of those, too.

It took three days.

Long days.

But I think that it looks pretty good.

Below is a full range of all the commoner product label types which the Monastery produces. Dry blends, and half oz. tinctures.

Above is one of the Monastery's specialty one-oz. tinctures.

Below, a standard set consisting of; 1 dry blend, 2 tinctures.

Below left are the Cortins. An exclusive range of dry blends.

For anyone who is interested, the Monastery of Herbs can be found online at:

This wasn't the first time I had gotten involved in a label project for the Monastery. In addition to the herbal blends that the alternative health practitioners prescribe to their patients, the Monastery also has a test kit of their products which is sold to the practitioners themselves.

When my friend first became involved in the company these test kits were packaged in a set of large flat boxes with lids that were close to 9"x12" and took full-sheet labels. Rather dorky full-sheet labels at the time. We put a good deal of work and colaboration into addressing this problem. We did one version, and then ran with it, producing a pair of ornate, old-fashioned "cigar box" style labels for these flat boxes. We thought they were pretty spiffy, but as my friend got more involved with the minutia of running a business, By the time we were ready to put the new labels into commission, it had become plain that he had a continuing problem with damage in shipping.

Eventually, the test kits were repackaged in a much more sturdy and compact set of boxes which required a different type of labeling altogether. Ultimately the labels developed for the new test kits set the general "high-tech" style which has been carried over (as much as possible) across the board on all Monastery products. Most notably in the Project from Heck.

Above left: early attempt at a redesigned test kit label. Above right: final version of the "cigar box" label. This version was never actually used.

Below: final design for the current test kit labels.