Why MOO?

MOO.com, if you haven’t heard of it, is a London company that lets you create all manner of printed matter using your own uploaded images or illustrations. MOO initially specialized in mini calling cards, but expanded their offerings this year to include full- (if slightly eccentrically-) sized business cards.

I loved the idea of being able to print small batches of cards with different colors and designs on the back, so I knew I wanted to give MOO a try. As an extra bonus, they offer nice uncoated, recycled cardstock—I can’t abide the kind of cheesy ultragloss treatments that most online printers offers. The drawbacks: you can’t yet upload a vector or PDF version of your designs (that functionality is rumored to be forthcoming; for now the best option is uploading 300 DPI jpgs), and the cards are a little pricier than what you’d pay for a big batch from Random Do-It-Yourself Internet Printer. My dream of a polychromatic batch of cards outweighed these concerns.

That’s great but

Multi-colored designs were a good start toward a card I was happy with, but I wanted to do something extra to make my cards stand out. I love the look and feel of letterpress printing, but couldn’t quite justify the cost at this early stage of my business. Happily, I remembered a recent Simple Bits post about his purchase of a custom hand-held embosser. With this lead, I sent the vector art for my honeycomb mark to Acorn Sales, and within days had my own sweet little embossing device.

It’s a little tricky getting the alignment correct, and a little cumbersome to emboss each card by hand, but I like knowing that I’ve personally made my mark on each card I’ll hand out. Using my embosser is a pleasingly tactile and old-fashioned experience; I’m actually looking forward to printing my next batch of cards so I can get it out again.

The ones that got away

Back in the heady days of August, my studio name was was going to be Step Sideways, and my typeface was going to be Galaxie Polaris, and my mark was going to be two rectangular bars, one cantilevered over the other (get it?!? they look like steps! and they’re sideways to each other!). For a variety of reasons, I scrapped this initial concept, but not before designing a set of cards. This was another MOO project; my idea was to present some of my favorite pithy design aphorisms on the backs of the cards, superimposed over my mark’s bars and using different combinations of my colors. So here you go, some of my draft one business cards: