Nations Photo Lab Brand Guidelines: The Maryland Print Lab Born From a Campus Photo Business

A campus photo business decides to print for itself.

Nations Photo Lab is a photo-printing lab based in Hunt Valley, in Baltimore County, Maryland. Its roots lie in a college photography business. Baltimore Magazine, in a profile in its March 2024 issue, says the founder, Ryan Millman, had launched GreekYearbook, a company that photographs fraternities and sororities at universities across the United States, and that Harvis Kramer, now the lab’s president, joined it in 2002 as its second full-time employee. GreekYearbook had been sending all of its printing out to other labs; the magazine reports that the team decided to bring printers in-house so that it could control quality, turnaround and cost itself.

The dates differ slightly by source. Baltimore Magazine says the lab came about in 2004; the company’s own About page, and a June 2023 anniversary message from Kramer on its blog, give 2005. The company names its founders as Ryan Millman, Jon Weinstock and Harvis Kramer, and says the trio bought a single Noritsu printer to start. Kramer’s anniversary message adds a few white plastic tables and a simple website to that picture, and describes a lab set up for professional photographers.

The magazine reports that Millman started with a mini-lab in Owings Mills, an area he knew well, and chose the name Nations Photo Lab because he believed the business could grow beyond the local photographers it served at first. It was soon printing for wedding, school and sports photographers around the country, and it later moved north to Hunt Valley. Kramer told the magazine that starting as a digital lab, at a time when many older labs were still converting from film, gave the company a head start.

The business has grown well past a single printer. The company says it now has more than 150 staff working in a facility of 55,000 square feet and has served more than 500,000 customers. Baltimore Magazine put the wider business at about 220 employees in 2024, around 180 of them in Maryland and the rest in York, Pennsylvania. GreekYearbook continues as a sister company, which the magazine described as working with a network of roughly 200 photographers.

Lustre, pearl and a click frame.

The core of the catalogue is the photographic print. Kramer told Baltimore Magazine that the lab’s prints are silver-halide prints, mostly on Fuji photo paper. The company’s website sorts prints by paper — glossy, lustre, pearl and linen — with giclée prints for fine-art work, and by size, from wallets and standard sizes through square and panoramic formats to large prints of 30 by 40 inches. In his June 2023 anniversary message, Kramer wrote that the lab would keep making silver-halide prints while using digital printing for products such as framed prints.

Around the prints sits a broad range of wall pieces and bound books. The site lists acrylic, metal and wood prints; mounted prints on styrene, gatorboard or foamcore; framed prints and gallery blocks; and photo books, wedding albums and an album line called Album99. Cards, calendars and gifts follow, from holiday cards and wedding stationery to sports trader cards, ornaments and photo cubes.

The lab’s sister company Artsy Couture, acquired in 2010 according to Baltimore Magazine, serves as its product-development arm. Kramer told the magazine that the brand holds more than eight patented products, among them a tool-free click frame for stretched photo prints, wooden photo cubes, cube ornaments and photo magnets, and that these are sold to consumers and resold to other businesses such as cruise lines, drug stores and theme parks. The magazine reports that most of the patented products are made in York.

For working photographers, ordering runs through the website, an NPL Prints app and a downloadable ROES ordering program listed on the site, with separate proofing, school-package and volume print services. The company backs its work with what it calls its Picture Perfect Guarantee and handles remakes through its support pages, and it publishes holiday shipping deadlines each year.

How professional labs present themselves.

Professional photo labs and film-processing labs sit between the photographer and the finished object. Most present themselves chiefly through the print: the paper it is made on, the process that made it and the size it comes in. Lab websites typically sort their catalogues by paper surface — glossy, lustre, matt, pearl or metallic — and separate photographic prints exposed on light-sensitive paper from inkjet or giclée prints made for fine-art work.

Around the print sit albums, photo books, cards and wall pieces. Labs name these ranges plainly, usually by material and construction: lay-flat books, hard and soft covers, mounted prints, framed prints, acrylic, metal and wood. Film labs add a second vocabulary of development and scanning, listing film formats, scan resolutions and turnaround times so that a photographer can compare one service with another before sending a roll.

Ordering is part of the brand. Many labs describe their software in practical terms: a web editor for families, a mobile app for quick prints, and downloadable ordering programs or proofing tools for professionals who send large batches. Service promises — remakes, colour correction, shipping deadlines and guarantees — are usually written as short named policies rather than long explanations.

Corporate pages tend to carry the history. Labs that began as a single printer or a small darkroom often tell that story in their About pages, alongside the names of their owners, the towns where their production sits and any group they now belong to. For a design reader, the category is a study in restraint: the identity frames the customer’s pictures and names the materials, and it rarely competes with the images it prints.

Built by photographers, for photographers.

Nations Photo Lab presents itself as a lab “built by photographers, for photographers,” a line that appears on its Our Story page and in Kramer’s anniversary message. Its website mixes two voices. One is professional, with paper names, pixel charts, ROES downloads and proofing prints; the other is aimed at families, with seasonal sales, gift guides and holiday deadlines. The company often shortens its name to NPL, and the president’s 2023 message on its blog closes with the sign-off “Yours in Photo.”

The story the company tells about itself stresses people and place. Its menus carry the lines “Real Humans behind every product” and “Handmade in Maryland & Pennsylvania,” and its About page introduces the team behind production, colour correction and customer service by role. Its stated vision, quoted in the 2023 anniversary message, is that “Life’s Explorations Deserve Unforgettable Presentation.” Baltimore Magazine framed the company in 2024 as a local business that grew into one of the largest photography printers in the country, and quoted Kramer saying that holding a photograph in your hand makes a memory feel more tangible and real.

The company’s account of its own history is told in the same plain terms. Kramer’s 2023 message describes the lab’s start with one Noritsu printer and a handful of tables, and sets out its choice to keep silver-halide printing as other labs moved away from it. The About page closes by describing Nations Photo Lab as a full-service photography lab, and lists its main products in a single sentence: photo prints, wall prints in metal and wood, photo albums and photo books.

For a design guide, Nations Photo Lab shows how a single lab can talk to professionals and families from the same storefront, keeping paper names and print processes visible while also selling cards and gifts. Compare it with Bay Photo Lab and WHCC, two other American photo labs in this series. For this guide we use an ink blue, a lustre grey and a paper white with a warm proof accent and a clean sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Nations Photo Lab’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.