The United States Business Card Company
“Location:
New York City Weekend Flea Markets (Indoor/Outdoor)
Saturday:
268 Mulberry St. (indoors, year round) between Houston & Prince St.
11:00am – 7:00pmSunday:
I.S. 44 Flea Market, 77th St. & Columbus Ave (indoors, cold weather & rain, April 1st- Nov 1st)”
This sounds most promising. Too bad it doesn’t appear that others do this in the PNW.
From the FAQ:
Q. Well that’s great, but your machine can’t measure up to my laser printer. I’ve got state of the art pixels. What have you got?
A.How many times have you called that 800 number and waited forever to deal with the malfunctioning of your printer? My Platen Press has few moving part, requires a little bit of oil now and then, and has never needed a service call. As for your state of the art pixels, they aren’t as perfect as you think. Look at them up close and you can see that the little dots that make up your text gives it a greyish cast, Yuck! With foundry type, the ink is applied to solid metal, covering the entire surface of the implanted typeface within the press and then crushed into the paper leaving a sunken solid impression that you can actually feel with your fingers. No dots, no cloudiness, and a tactile feeling you can’t ever get with your printer.
Q. Well, Ok Mr. Bigshot Letterpress man. But I’ve got premium paper like Strathmore and Cranes that I can run through my printer. You can’t do that.
A. Yes I can, as well as printing even more! My platen press can print those difficult to print papers and card stocks such as breakfast cereal boxes, papyrus, cardboard, real wood, and that triple thick cardboard. Many commercial printers won’t even touch those. A platen press is especially useful for these specialty papers such as those handmade papers with the deckled edges often used for wedding invitations (And I can make those for you too!).
I’m liking this. No rate citations on his site, alas, and no biz card samples, so I don’t know about the inset or two-color.
Stern & Faye are in the Skagit Valley.
WoodWorks Press appears to specialize in poetry chapbooks and broadsides (and fine instruments). While a $45/year subscription will bring you a year’s output, “including obscure party favors,” I see no indication that Mr. Hunter takes on job type.
Hm, I wonder if ordering a rubber stamp with this design might be about as cost effective, for that matter. It certainly opens stocks for consideration.
I have also been operating on the untested assumption that it’s a bad idea to use inkjet-printed cards, based on the solubility of the inks. It occurs to me that I should test this thesis, and so I will, forthwith.
It’s time once again to engage in my quixotic quest for short-run personal business cards. I’ve used xeroxed cards in the past to meet this need. This time, the burgeoning development of direct-to-plate offset printing and the corresponding flowering of online quickprint with uploads or online layout tools led me to investigate color-based options as well.
Googling on the subject presents a nearly impenetrable thicket of search-engine optimization spam links, which mostly direct the user toward one of two online providers, VistaPrint and iPrint.com. VistaPrint offers an intriguing promo: 250 business cards “free,” plus shipping. Naturally, the completed order is directed through a maze of upsells (faster shipping, remove the backside advertising) such that you’re likelier to spend about $20 on the cards there than not. Having just received one such card from a new acquaintance, I can report that at least the backside advertising is not obtrusive or in poor taste – just a simple logo and line of small black type on the back of the card. Unfortunately, that makes the backside of the card more graphically effective, and in better taste, than the front of the card.
Additionally, the basic layouts that are available are less than optimal and certainly do not offer a satisfactory range of control over the design. For $20 one would expect to do better.
Selecting a ‘premium’ card order does open up the range of possible layouts somewhat but this is accomplished primarily by increasing the number of ill-advised photographic background choices available. The ability to work with type on the card remains very limited – one cannot move the type blocks around, change the size or color of the type either globally, line-by-line, or by block.
Noting this, I was happy to see that VistaPrint does offer direct uploading of card designs in standard graphic formats, including professional ones; but that functionality is only available under IE on Windows, so I’m not even going to spend more time looking into the option.
Pricing for premium cards on a run of $250 is $9.99 (plus the same shipping upsell), so in theory one should be able to execute a run for a total outlay of under $20 – only the failure to provide a Mac option turns me away from at least experimenting.
Looking elsewhere, the presence of VistaPrint’s “free” run of 250 cards makes finding a provider who will even take an order for less than 500 cards somewhat challenging. iPrint.com offers what appears to be competitively priced cards in short runs with a much greater degree of flexibility over the card design – type lines and blocks can be resized, colored, and moved around on the page in increments as small as 1/64 of an inch. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to determine if you’ve accurately aligned baselines in this manner.
Small, in-line graphics can be uploaded to include in the design and layout of the card as well – unfortunately, these graphics are limited to a bitmap format (such as a tiff or a jpeg) and to two colors or to grayscale. Multicolored images are converted to greyscale. The placed graphic, however, may be assigned a spot color, from a very limited sixteen color swatch book. No Pantone equivalents for the colors are specified, so it’s a crapshoot.
Here is a jpeg of the design I’m working with currently, and here is a version of it I assembled in iPrint’s online layout tool.
from iPrint
While close, one may note that the ‘MW’ graphic (a design element I may drop or replace with something else, or nothing) is smaller on the iPrint version, and that one simply has to hope for the best in the matter of type treatment and color. The other point to consider is that while iPrint’s online tools offer a high degree of flexibility, each layout change is executed as a form submission from your web browser – and the layout seen here is nothing like any of the layouts used as a starting point. I’d estimate that it took me about an hour and a half to get the online version of the card to the point seen here, while the Illustrator-based version probably took about 20 minutes or so to develop.
So, given that one of my goals in this experiment is 250 cards for under $20, what would the iPrint version run? iPrint’s price list specifies $19.99 for 250 as a base, but invokes add-on charges such as $3.00 for a graphic, and another bump if more colors than black or used – so the base for this design on a run of 250 would be $27.99, before shipping or any taxes (probably not applicable in this instance).
Hm, thirty bones for a rough approximation of what I want? Bad choice.
A bit more digging yeilded Overnight Prints, which does offer a direct upload tool. The tool also evaluates the file uploaded and will provide semi-cryptic error information if your file is not appropriately configured. In this case, proper is an EPS with only spot colors. I find this an odd choice given that short run and on-demand printing is inherently dependent on four-color direct-to-plate printing. So how much would it run here?
A 250-card run is $29.95 plus shipping (calculated at the time the order is placed) – so $35 to $37 is a probable estimate. The next break above 250 is 1000 for a base cost of $39.95, which puts one back in the fifty-dollar range for a long run – exactly what I don’t want. I am interested in the short runs for the specific purpose of indulging in the pleasure of redesigning the card at frequent intervals – and so I find myself aground, I think. In a couple of weeks I may experiment with the upload option at VistaPrint from a Windows computer.
In the meantime, I am beginning an assiduous search for an in-city letterpress. I think there’s something highly interesting in the idea of Helvetica and seventeenth-century swash lettering meeting on the bed of a ninteenth-century press.
It seems that the School of Visual Concepts was offering letterpress classes in the winter of 2003, and it looks like they still are. $195 for a day’s seminar, taught by one Amy Redmond? Hm, if I can get my 250 cards out of it – might be worth a look. I see, however, that I just missed that exact class: “Letterpress Business Card Workshop,” $225, ran on May 15 and 16, darn it.
Once, there was an active letterpress shop, The Living Museum of Letterpress Printing, at 2017 2nd Ave downtown, but I believe it’s now evaporated. I’ve already bemoaned the fact that one cannot order materials from the Williamsburg printshop online; I wonder, are there any manual presses that also conduct biz over the web? I recognize that cost may simply prove prohibitive if I choose to move in this direction, but the physical act of setting type – letters on a composing stick, or rubber stamps on a toy hand-cranked drum press – is the first thing that awakend my interest in visual creation.
eBay offers at least one tabletop press at the moment. As a child, I had a version of the Cub toy printing press. The version seen behind the eBay link is considerably older than mine – but the principle is the same. I had more or less completely forgotten about this toy until I started writing about it here.
The time has come at last to snap on the dog-collar and leash and join the rest of you cell-phone toters out there. I have a list of features that I know I need, and this MeFi thread includes links to a number of resources. I think I recall seeing a more recent AskMe thread recently too.
Features wanted:
Single number, multiple phones, covers my land line as well as my and Viv’s phone. Ideally, the land line phone number rings the land line as well as the cells.
Palm OS, desktop synching. Mac-friendly. I don’t care about bluetooth because I don’t have a bluetooth adapter. I suppose I don’t mind if the phone has it but it’s not a big deal, and I would resist paying more.
Audio recording: ideally up to an hour and a half, but forty-five minutes is acceptable. Needs to be able to operate to record conversations directly and as a note recorder for interview situations. High-quality music recording is not a requirement, but again it would be pretty nice.
A camera, I guess. I don’t really care about this but I know that I have been leaving my camera at home because it’s too big, so it may make more sense to put the camera into the phone.
The ability to communicate to Viv’s phone even if we share the same number.
Handsfree features. Headset adapter with standard eighth-inch plugs.
I know that PDAs are holding back on implementing WiFi as a feature-segmenting marketing device, and assume that will be the case in phone land as well. But that would surely be an excellent feature.
Research links:
I call upon a certain gadgeteer to set me up the bomb.
I could reload my website all day long, just watching my spiffy new randomizing header reload and change. I loves me summa dat ol’ woodtype, yers I do.
Alas, though, for Photoshop’s v.7 lack of the excellent Illustrator filters that so beautifully allow random shifts of baseline and edge to be gently inflected ‘pon the bodies of the glyphs, in earnest pursuit of the organickally worn type our forefathers knew and endured.
Did you know, as far as I can tell, that it is simply not possible to order the fine letterpress tchotschkes produced in the lovely type shop of Ye Olde Colonial Williamsburg online? Will no-one make an appeal to King George, that ye internette may be mayde availabbule to the fine & industryous colonials?
Alas, too, that there is no third dimension avalilable to provide texture in the context of ye webbe payge. Were it so, I would marke this to be nubbly and stiffe, with a ridged embossing, like the book it imitates.
Oo-er! Looka this! Some luverly mud o’er ‘ere!
My old drummer Sean has asked me to help him get a shipping center set up for his Amazon-hosted store. There are a raft of items to deal with. This is a link dump for research.
Shipping and inventory software
I posted to AskMe on a busy day and only got one reply, from me old chum Mr. Lope. He noted that the software offered by HarveySoft fit the bill for a former company of his.
Despite the horrible, price-hiding design of the website (Now with useless java-enabled navigation buttons!!) I was able to observe that the pricing page appears to provide initial confirmation of Mr. Lope’s judgement.
More options need to be identified.
Amazon support and integration
Amazon store builder – a bit off topic, but worth remembering. Automates access to Amazon-listed products to be wrapped in a non-Amazon website.
Guidelines for Managing Large Inventories for Marketplace sellers.
Amazon discussion board for zShops users.
Amazon tips for Pro Merchants.
Telephone management
Another poster recommended an open-source telephone tree package, Asterisk, which does look interesting from a features perspective. But I suspect that phone systems will be close to the bottom of my priority list; I haven’t really started working through my feature needs there yet. I like the idea of a no-hardware solution, though; Having the phone company offer the features, perform the maintenance, etc., for a messaging tree system is attractive to me from a desire to provide simplicity and to minimize the physical infrastructure needed.
I have a strong suspicion that the physical location we are moving into will prove unsuitable within a year and until I know that idea is wrong will likely want to avoid hefty setup.
Workspace setup; office supplies
Sean is getting shelving; we’ll need chairs and office supplies and so forth. A trip to Ducky’s and to other local used furniture suppliers is a necessity.
I need to make a list of smaller materials needed, and another one about services needed such as recycling, etc.
Computers etc.
Sean has two workstations we’ll begin with. I am sure we’ll need more (they are from an inexpensive supplier that is identified with manufacturing problems). I’ll need to identify and wrangle licensing for a standard suite, as well.
I know I’ll want to add wireless to the LAN as soon as we’re set up, and suspect that notebooks will be desired within a month of getting rolling. I was able to find a hub for my cousin Eric in LA at Fry’s for $30.00 with a $30.00 rebate, so this should not be a problem.
We’ll need a laser printer for invoicing and so forth.
(posted in an incomplete state, will be revised.)
Visual Filters and Transitions Reference provides the tools needed to do inline image filtering for IE. I’m wondering if there’s a better way to do this, or if it’s worth the effort.
I think in this incarnation of the blog, it would be pretty cool to make any embedded image display in the browser in a manner similar to the rotating headshots up in the masthead, in a high-contrast maroon-and-manila version. I am not very interested in creating a duplicate image base that has that style enforced, although I can see that a one-time duping process might be the best route for the legacy material. I don’t much want to have to do image processing when I post, and that tack would set a need for dual images, one in true color, for when I move to a new design, and one for the pseudo-printed look.
I suppose in theory I could rig up something that would enforce a reprocessed image at display time using Apache and something like ImageMagick on the back end. However, I’d prefer to have the browser do the work; and I’d also like to have it happen on a case-by-case basis (so I can turn it off if I want).
My instinct says that I’m only gonna find this feature in IE, because it’s a fairly obscure need. Anyone out there have a grasp of this?
Yeesh. Well, I didn’t expect this layout to happen when I woke up yesterday morning.
I disregarded no-tables, so it’s quite inelegant; and I have yet to finesse the repeating edges that make up the book’s borders. But it’s in the neighborhood.
I just reformatted my primary audio storage drive by accident. I have a 12gb backup from last August, but the collection was nearing 20gb. Crappe, and sundry florid Elizabethan oathes.