19 posts tagged “stickers”

We've had a very busy time of it here at MOO Towers recently. Some of the MOO Crew were at SXSWi, while others were working on the new MiniCard box - and additional packaging ideas to be revealed soon. The dev team are all hard at work preparing for the USA launch, and others have just hopped on a plane to Photoshop World, in Boston.

The Recruitment Crew are hard at work, reading CVs for our recent UK and USA job postings - and have asked me to mention that if you haven't got response to something you've sent us, please don't worry. They're reading everything very carefully, and hoping to respond as soon as they can.

The lovely folks in the warehouse are still sending out orders as fast as their little legs will carry them and we're still seeing beautiful Cards and Stickers flying out the door.

It's been a little while since we last held up that mirror to show you how great you are, so look! A little round up in pictures, from you, the MOO community:

supercoco9 has been decorating a mini-laptop with Stickers:

While Buster shows us what Stickers are really meant for, in this photo by absolutely small:

And Seattle Roll shows us just how cute MiniCards can be...

While Chameleon Designs goes for understated elegance, using photos of her own creations on Business Cards:

I received this fantastic MiniCard in the post, from the lovely Cole:

And finally, these beautiful invitations were created by Lady Design for her forthcoming exhibition, using Postcards:

If you're feeling creative and you've just received - or are about to receive - some MiniCards in the post, don't forget our mini-competition!

Depending on where you are the world, you may or may not know that London, home of both MOO and most of it's employees, has been overcome by snow. We don't do 'weather' well in this country, really - whatever weather we get, it always comes as a bit of a shock, and so buses, trains, tubes etc are still working out if they can run or not. At time of writing, most are favouring 'not'. Consequently, many of the MOO Crew are working from home - and judging from the Twitters we've seen, many of you are too. Once you've come in from playing in the snow - sorry, working in the snow - you'll be needing to take a break. This is where the lovely Jo Carter has come to your aid. Like many of you, she's a Facebook user, and a Packrat fan. Not only that, but she has a MOO API key and knows how to use it! Jo's built a fantastic little application that lets you make a StickerBook from the Packrat graphics. You can get 90 different stickers in a StickerBook, and you can choose from over 1000 different images! There's everything from monkeys, to ninjas, seahorses to stilettos. There's some things fluffy... And even a few things MOO... So, take a look at Packrat - in the interests of social media research - and then, make yourself some stickers! The graphics are fantastic - Packrat player or not. They'd be perfect for yourself, or the content would make a great present for children (of all ages).

It's that time of year again - the time when lots of shops reduce the pricing on calendars left unsold after the Christmas rush. Not only that, but you didn't get one for Christmas, and all that's left are things like 'Road signs of Europe' or 'Hard-hats we've loved and lost', or something equally uninspiring.

The great people at PhotoJojo have just shared a much better idea, by one of their readers, Sandy Weisz. It's a perpetual wall calendar, made with your own photos!

Nice, isn't it? Also works as great motivation to get out there and start taking more photos - as you need at least one photo each, of the numbers 1 through 31, and a letter for each day of the week.

If you wanted square prints, like the ones above, you could print them with Notecards, but if you've got a smaller space available, then colourful photo Business Cards could be good. If you fancied mixing it up a bit through the year, you could go for MiniCards - as with 100 in a box, you'll have some spare OR you could make a weeny one with Stickers!

Check out PhotoJoJo's instructions on how to make your own.

Thanks to ex-MOO Iain for spotting this - he's gone, but not forgotten!

If you're looking for a quick n' crafty Christmas gift to make - either alone while you enjoy some peace and quiet, or with the kids for added noisey fun  - you could think about something like this great little calendar, made by jbloomphotos.

She's mixed more traditional scrapbooking materials with family photos, printed on MiniCards. It adds an extra personal touch, and makes for an ideal present to send in the post to family far away. If you're really clever, you could make the MiniCards removable, so as the month ends, they could be used for bookmarks too. The beautiful ones below were made by Emmalynne

MiniCards are acid and lignin free, incidentally, so good for scrapbooks of all kinds. And don't forget, if you fancy going glue-free, for less mess with the kids, Stickers work really well too (also acid and lignin free).

And talking of Stickers - look at this. It's scrapbooking the new school way!

This beautiful collection of tech Stickers (including ones from MOO) have been lovingly and very carefully applied to a Mac laptop, by Phil Hawksworth, using a circular template. It's so nicely done, I kind of wish it were mine.

One of the best things about working for MOO is that we're lucky enough to have incredibly creative customers. If we're ever stuck for inspiration all we need to do is look at the beautiful cards whizzing by in the warehouse, or the amazing store of photographs in the MOO Flickr pool.

We've seen designers and photographers, crafters, makers and bakers all printing with MOO - but until now, we'd never seen a StickerBook of images quite like this:

or this:

or even this:

These are the 'i-men', created by the London-based designer, Gareth White. There's a whole army of them, ranging from the slightly cute, to the oddly creepy.

After far too long spent wondering how these were made, I decided to get in touch with Gareth myself, and ask. He was kind enough to answer and this is what he said:

Gareth, how long have you been creating the 'i-men'?

Oh that's easy - exactly 3 years this month. I have hundreds of the critters, I only post the best of the beast, but there are loads more in the reserves.

There's so many -  do you make one every day?

Not every day because it's so physically demanding, but I think about them most days. They form an orderly mental queue and then I have a flurry of creation. It's a little bit like getting Gizmo wet.

So, what got you started?

When Apple launched the imac with the intergrated isight and photobooth. That day my mind split horizontally, it was like the big-bang. That is day zero for the 'i-men'.

They all look so complex - what was the most difficult one to do?

I don't have one beast in particular that was especially the most difficult, but the less elements I use the harder they are to create. All the best things are the most refined and simple - even beasts.

How do you decide what to use in the creation - or do you just use whatever is to hand?

Oh, well initially I just got whatever was close to hand, and to a certain extent that is still the case - but I have started seeing objects differently. For example, I'll see a roll of gaffer tape and think 'what a great pair of eyes that will make' or something else hanging around and think 'I'll use that for a big long tongue!'

How do you actually do it? Don't you need more than one pair of hands?

Well obviously they're all mirror images. Some of the men may look pretty crazy - and I do get a little bit contortionist nowadays - but really it's pretty simple to get going and start making wild creatures. After a while you get to know certain tricks - like holding objects at the correct angle will make your fingers into a mouth or nose. However, I think the eyes should always be an inanimate object, that's where the beast's soul is.

Have you got any photos of you actually making an 'i-man'? I want to see!

Ha - it's funny you should ask that - here's some from the old days:

You can check the flickr set to see the results.

What was your inspiration? Where do your ideas come from?

I am genuinely inspired by not knowing what is going to come out of a session. I get so excited when the perfect monster arrives. It's the same feeling I get when I walk through the doors of a jumble sale. You never know what's inside.

How much can you plan your images? For each perfect picture, have you got loads that are just a bit off?

That's just it - I have no idea initially. They evolve during a session and you can see that from my set on flickr - they are grouped inadvertingly by the materials and light that were to hand at the time.

So, Frankenstein by night... What's your day job?

I am co-creative director of New Future Graphic. It's okay though, everyone is well aware of this thing.

----
Gareth - you're awesome!

----

So - anyone else fancy making one? It's the weekend, c'mon, what else are you going to do?

We're back after the dConstruct conference - and glad to say, much fun was had by all. There were a few MOO Stickers lurking around the place, in various guises - like these for Silverback, which were shot by sophystar:

You can see them already stuck in place, in this lovely shot by paulstanton

We were also excited to see MOO Stickers on the big screen! They were shown in a presentation by Matt Jones, of Dopplr, and handed out later in the day. This shot is by Andy Budd

And although we didn't get to see these MiniCards in person, we did spot them on Flickr, in this photo by koopd. Great colours:

And talking of Flickr, I've just seen these pop up - matching MiniCards and Stickers, by dotdean

Been to any conferences recently? If so, what did you put on *your* cards?

One of those rare posts from the technology department. I'm very pleased to announce the MOO API. The API allows those with some programming skills to write programs that can specify all the data required to make an MOO product (including fully variable images AND text), and then redirect a user to the checkout process for that product.

At present, the API is in beta - we think it's mostly done, but we might make a few changes before we 'go 1.0'. We expect any changes to be backward-compatible at this point. What's more, when we go 1.0, we'll be sharing revenue back with the API key holders (and we'll backdate for any packs made during the beta period). The exact revenue structure is still being worked on, and we'll announce it nearer the time.

At moo.com/api, you can sign up to play, find the documentation, and join the developer's mailing list.

So, what can I do with it?

Simply, if you have some images that you want people to be able to print, you can build an integration to connect up to MOO.

I'm more excited by things that people will make that we haven't thought of, but here's some things that have been done:

I hooked up the TheyWorkForYou.com API to our API to produce a stats-based political trading card game, a project I've been meaning to do for about 5 years now.

Dan Coulter (of phpFlickr fame) has written a PHP wrapper library that makes building MOO API applications really very simple indeed, and a couple of sample apps

Basic - add some images, make a pack. Basic, indeed.
Mosaic - takes a big picture and makes pack of minicard tiles from it.
Rainbow - makes a pack out of your most interesting flickr photos, sorted by colour.

Alberto from Tagmore has a 3D barcode sticker generator.

I'm looking forward to many more!

Enjoy.

One of the nice things about MOO products, is the chance to get your stuff OFF the computer and into people's hands. As more and more people take digital photos, more and more people have virtual folders full of stuff they never do anything with. You can't stick a digital file on the fridge, and you can't prop it up on your desk. You can't send it in the post, and you can't frame it and put it on your wall.

And you know what? It's a bit of a shame, that.

Today we're going to celebrate people who take 'getting-stuff-off-your-computer' one step further. Scrapbookers! MOO cards and stickers are all acid and lignin free (took us a while to research that one, but people asked, so we thought we should check.) This means they're perfect for adding a unique and personal touch to your scrapbook designs... Something you can't buy in a shop.

It also means you can make a scrapbook full of images about your life, loves and friends and get everything lurking on your hard drive *off* and turned into something beautiful.

Here's a lovely example by Relly, who used MOO MiniCards for this design:

And another example using MiniCards - this time in a journal, by Heather:

Taking a different tack, Jamie Bloom made this beautiful calendar:

and Gina created this mix of painting and collage.

Relly has also taken advantage of MOO Stickers - to great effect. Look at this! Its a page full of a whole StickerBook's worth of images, detailing an entire year:

(If you fancy making Stickers, now's a good time - we've got a special offer!)

But some people do scrapbooking a little differently. These beautiful cards have been made by Renske. She creates collages and then photographs them. The resulting pictures make great MiniCards themselves:

and I've just spotted this - a scrapbook style design, made of the MiniCards which feature photos of Renske's scrapbook style designs!

Scottish scrapbooker, Emma has done something similar, and used photos of her beautiful collages, for MOO Postcards. Her designs are fantastic - check out the more detailed photo.

So, the moral of the story? Get out the glue, get your photos off the computer, and get creative!
Happy weekend, everyone!

Yes, MOO's having a Sticker Design Competition! After heading off to various conferences, we've seen a *lot* of stickers on laptops. Some are good, some are ok, and some would just be a lot cooler if they were designed by someone good. That's where you come in.

We want to create the perfect StickerBook of laptop Stickers. 90 different Stickers, with great designs, illustration or photography. Something that will really stand out, and something you'd be proud to stick on your shiny new laptop.

How do you enter? Well, it's as easy as 1,2,3

1) First, design your sticker. It should be 283x283 pixels, at 300dpi. (Or 24x24mm at 300 dpi).  You should save it as a high quality RGB Jpeg.

2) Next, submit your design to Pixish. (Pixish is free, and easy to join - so don't worry. They're nice people, and they don't do spam).

3) Vote on other people's entries and wait to see if you win.

What will you win?
Well, every entry chosen for the book will win a Flickr Pro account. We'll also choose one overall winner, who will win a £100 voucher for Magma Books. Magma are one of the best design bookshops around, so if you love design, you'll love the prize.

So, what are you waiting for? Find out even more about prizes and sizes and get stuck in!

There is much excitement at MOO for a variety of reasons this week - first up, we've been nominated for a Webby! Twice!

We've been nominated once in the 'Retail' category, and once in 'Services'. You can see all the nominees here. As you can imagine, we're honoured to be in such great company - among sites that we use and love ourselves.

Voting has already started on the 'People's Voice' section of the site, and the winners will be announced on May 6th. If you'd like to take part in the voting yourself (and vote for MOO, obviously) - sign up and when your registration has gone through, you'll find us under the 'Marketplace' group in the 'Retail' category and under the 'Services' group in the 'Services' category.

And if you *do* vote for MOO, we will of course, love you forever.

Next up - The London Marathon is on Sunday! While we haven't been training, exactly, we have been preparing. Our friends at Just Giving will be out in full force - and they've got MOO Stickers! Look out for them at the London Marathon Expo. And do make sure you get a Sticker pack, because it took us ages to put them all together - as you can see...

Here's Pete, working hard (he was last seen... working hard)

And here's a lovely pile of Stickers, all ready to go.

Good luck to to friends of MOO who are running in the Marathon - especially to Francis Storr, and Emma and Zoe - who were kind enough to let us feature their cards all those training days ago. We're right behind you. Quite a long way behind actually, but we are there.

Next up - leather holders! If you want one - now is the time to get one. We have the very last holders in this style that Cobu will ever make. That's right, they're not making these little holders any more. BUT If you're not in the mood for Lime Sorbet, the perfect colour for Spring - don't panic. We have a slightly different Leather holder in other colours coming very soon.

And finally, are you a London based MOO user? Those lovely people over the road would like to talk to you... Help them out, if you can - there's cake involved.