What the family gets
An order of service laid out from the same photographs and words as the page, matched to its own palette and motif, so the two feel like one piece of work rather than two. Or, if you already have one, upload your own PDF and the page carries that instead.
There are two ways to make one, and a family is only ever on one of them. (If you already have an order of service, designed by somebody else, you can upload that instead and the page carries it; that is not one of the two, it is instead of them.)
The design comes with every page and there is no separate fee for it: the order of service is part of what £225 buys, not an extra, and a family who does not want one simply does not use it. What you pay your printer is for the printing alone.
The two ways to make one
Choose a ready-made layout
Set the running order, the way you would write it out for the day, and choose one of five layouts: a four-page A5 folded from one sheet, the same without photographs, a words-only version for a short or humanist service, a single A6 card for the wake table, or eight pages on two sheets with room for readings in full. Nothing else to decide.
Or build your own
If you want it to hold more, or to fall in a particular order, build it yourself. You add what you want, one piece at a time: a hymn, a reading, a poem, a piece of music, a photograph with a caption, someone speaking and who they are, words of your own for a welcome or a prayer or the thanks at the end, and a deliberately blank page where you want a pause. Then you move them into the order you want.
You choose the length: 4, 8, 12 or 16 pages, or let it pick the smallest that everything fits into. The front and back stay where they belong, and everything else flows between them. If what you have added will not fit the length you chose, it tells you which parts do not fit and offers the next size up. It never quietly drops anything, and it never shrinks the type to make it work.
The A6 card is a layout rather than a length, so it sits outside this: it is one side of card, and it holds what one side of card holds.
What it looks like
The same example order of service, built for a fictional family, shown here in two of the eighteen palettes so you can see how the design changes to suit a family's choice.
Harbour palette
Garden palette
Built for a fictional example family, to show the design, not a real person.
Who prints it, and roughly what it costs
We supply the files; the printing itself is not something we do. Most families use their funeral director's own printer, who already knows how to handle this kind of job. A high-street printer or an online short-run printer works just as well if you would rather arrange it yourself.
As a rough guide, a hundred copies comes to somewhere around £80 to £120, at a funeral director's own printer or an online one. That is from published prices and one real order, not a quote for your job. One thing catches people out: online printers list "orders of service" as eight-page booklets and often will not do a single folded sheet under that name, so if you have chosen the four-page layout, ask for a folded A5 leaflet instead. Paper, quantity and how quickly you need them all move the price, so ask your printer for a quote against the files we supply: we would rather you had an honest number from the printer doing the work than a guess from us.
The files
For each layout we prepare two files: a proof, in page order, for the family to read through before anything is printed; and a print file, with the pages arranged the way a printer needs them so the sheets fold the right way round. Both are made to the standard a printer expects, and a photograph that is too small to print sharply is refused rather than printed soft.
It stays current with the page
The order of service is built from the same material as the page, so a change to the running order, a confirmed time, or a new photograph carries through to both. Every change to the page makes a fresh order of service, right up to the day, so the copy that goes to print is the same as what the page says. The order of service also appears as pages on the site itself, for anyone who could not be in the room.
Sending the files
The family sends the print-ready file straight from the page, by email, to themselves or directly to their printer, with a link that works for seven days. No one needs to ask us for the file.
More about the page
Or see all the prices, or write to hello@eternallyloved.co.uk.