MOO MiniCards, Blood Ties and Seanan's CD

My MOO Minicards arrived while we were in California! I ordered them on February 19th and they landed in my mailbox around Wed. Mar. 7th (my sister was checking my mailbox up to then), which is nearly 2.5 weeks. During that time, I received an automated e-mail message saying that there had been a printing problem, and that my cards were being reprinted.



Though I was disappointed not to get the cards before I left for California, I'm glad there was some kind of quality check going on. Apparently some people are having problems with their MOO cards. When I was in California, Beckett showed me some of her cards which had a blank strip at the bottom despite her careful cropping. Mine turned out fine, though.

I was very pleased with the quality of my cards. Nice satiny finish, thick cardstock, and the colours turned out well. I chose 20 different illustrations, which meant 5 cards of each (100 total). The designs with bright colours and simple lines turned out the best, in my opinion.

This is what the back of each card looks like:





My only real beef is that I wish I could have chosen a higher-res version of my Flickr user icon (which was from a photo by illustrator/photographer Beckett Gladney). The low-res fuzziness is pretty obvious. Hopefully this will be a future MOO option!

Instead of using the cropping tool on MOO, I created a template and did my cropping first, storing my images in a separate Flickr set. That way I could take my time in choosing and cropping, then just load the set when I was ready and move the already-cropped images over (instead of having to do all my cropping in one session on the MOO site). For tips on how to get accurate cropping on your MOO MiniCards and image sizes, see this FAQ. I basically created a template that could be shrunk to a 692x1600 pixel image, making sure to account for about 2mm "bleed area" around the edges.

After you place an order, you can re-order the same set if you want. I'd like to re-order certain images but want to swap around other cards -- another advantage of doing my cropping offline; I just have to readjust my MOO Flickr set and then load the images I want without having to do any re-cropping.



I posted in Inkygirl, asking if anyone else was using their MOO Minicards for promotional purposes. Screenwriter Jurgen Wolff wrote: "I love moo cards too--have attached a scan of my set of minimoos, with one of the back as well. Only problem is they're too expensive to use for my guerrilla action--slipping into every writing-related book in every bookshop I come across... I am thinking of getting 2-sided business cards printed up with these kinds of designs/slogans, they're cheaper." The Web site URL mentioned below, by the way, doesn't go live until April:



All in all, I'm very happy with my MOO cards and plan to do another print run when my current cards are running low. If you see me in person, feel free to ask for one! Or let me know if you'd like to swap MOO cards by mail.

You can find out more about MOO MiniCards at MOO.com.



I remember when I first received the portable CD player on the right. It looked SO small (compared to a full-blown CD player) and slick at the time. At the Apple store in California, Jeff bought me one of the new iPod Shuffles. Holy cow, is it TINY. And it holds 1 GB of audio! My old CD player looks like a dinosaur in comparison.

And now I'm wondering what this iPod Shuffle will look like to my nieces when they're my age.

Links O' The Day

Tanya Huff's Blood Ties blog! For those that don't know, Blood Ties (based on Tanya's Blood books) is now airing on Lifetime at 10 pm ET/PT on Sundays.

Suicide squirrels driving utilities nuts: Thanks to Dave Weingart for the link.

A while back, I mentioned that I had recorded some flute for Seanan McGuire's new CD. Seanan is now taking pre-orders for Stars Fall Home. "Featuring fifteen tracks of pure goodness, with performances by artists from all around the world (represented countries include the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, and Germany), this is truly going to be an album not to be missed." The CD will be released in late June. And do check out the very cool cartoon that Seanan drew of me on her Featured Artists page!





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