Using moo.com Cards

I’ve been using moo.com cards for sometime now. They differ from “normal” business cards in two ways, as seen above:

• They’re narrower, about half the size.
• You can put a different picture on the backs of each card.

The price is currently 100 cards for $20, not including some $4-5 for shipping from London to Austin.

The Benefits

I like these cards a lot, and they’re well worth the trouble to create and pay for them.

The primary reason that I like them is that they’re just cool: selecting my own, full color pictures to have on the back is fun and the size is fun too.

In my work, people are always exchanging business cards, and anything out of the ordinary is exciting because so little is out of the ordinary in the world of business cards. What been especially fun is finding that I’ve “infected” someone with using moo.com cards. This morning I found out that one more person I gave one to started using them as well. I get countless people who get a little fit of mini-depression when they say “well, I’d get these, but my company won’t let me get ‘non-standard’ cards.” Too bad for that company as these cards are, as I said, very memorable and remarkable. Each time I give them out I end up in a 2-3 minute conversation about just the cards; once people flip them over, I often end up talking about the picture on the back.

There’s a fear of offending the fuddy-duddier people out there with stuff like these cards which is pretty unfounded. In consulting, the fear would be that you’d give this card to someone, they wouldn’t take you seriously, and then you end up loosing money because they don’t hire, help, or otherwise engage with you. Now, maybe if I put nudies on the back, that’d be the case, but so far no one has given me the “what, are you a joke?” response. Quite the opposite in fact.

I’ve also received moo.com cards from several people in the mail for wedding save the dates. That’s a nice use!

Ordering the Cards

I’ve ordered several batches of the cards. The first batch came out with the é screwed up, but moo.com quickly and for free did a re-print. As with most * 2.0, small, online shops, their customer service is awesome. Subsequent batches were just fine.

What to Put on the Card

I decided to put “normal” info on the car: my name (bold), company name, URL (bold), email address, and phone number. Since I work out of home, I don’t really have a mailing address, and, really, in hi-tech mailing addresses are kind of silly for cards.

Selecting Pictures

You can select the pictures that show up on your moo.com cards from several sources, I choose using flickr as I put all the pictures I care about into my flickr account.

The first time I did it, I used the painful selection and crop tool that moo.com provides. This is the worst part of the whole process as selecting and cropping takes a long, long time in the Ajax form and, worse, it tends to error out for me. So, I’ll spend 30-40 minutes selecting pictures, click “done,” and it’s all like “oh, sorry, this crapped out.”

The first time, I finally got this work by using Safari (I think). The second time, I instead made custom images to the specifications moo.com suggestions. They make those format guides kind of hard to fine — I’ve had to tell other people who couldn’t find one, but for graphically dumb people like me they boil down to making images that are 1024×443. You can, of course, orient the pictures however you like: landscape or portrait to use the printer terms.

In the first batch I had far more different pictures than in the second batch. To be frank, I got tired to making each image, so I stopped after 20.

For the second batch, I selected less pictures of myself and family and more of my co-workers and just funny things. And dogs, though I tried to cut back on those. Basically, I followed the “kill your darlings rule”: even if I thought it was a nice picture, I tried not to include it because, frankly, looking at other people’s banal “family photos” is actually pretty boring. You want something interesting, hopefully that makes someone say “WTF?”, long for tasty burgers or a drink, or laugh.

Once I created those 20 pictures, I uploaded them to flickr, then used moo.com’s flickr tag search to bring them up, and that was pretty much it.

For the next, 3rd batch, I’m hoping to add new photos I’ve taken or found since then. That’s a major fun part of moo.com cards: getting different “series” of them.

Thankfully, moo.com has added an account feature since I ordered my first batch when they opened. This should make it easier to just order up a new batch (with some additions) in the future.

Hacking the Front Picture

The one trick I’ve figured out is customizing the picture on the front of the cards. Last I ordered them, if you use flickr as the source for images, moo.com uses your buddy icon as the picture on the left front of the card. As a business card, what I want here is the RedMonk logo. So, I just changed my flickr logo to the RedMonk logo when making the card — and kept it there until I received them in the mail — and it showed up on the final cards as you can see.

Really, I think it’s pretty silly that they don’t let you upload a logo.

Other moo.com Products

Notecards

I don’t really have the need for the notecards, but I can see that they’d be nice for making post-card or other things to mail out. I don’t really mail things out though, so no use for it yet.

Maybe Holiday/Christmas (post-) cards?

Stickers!

I’d heard rumours from people in London that moo.com was fixin’ to print stickers. Checking their site today, it looks like they’re shipping stickers. I’m eager to check these out for my own use for my DrunkAndRetired.com podcast and for RedMonk. Free shipping in July! I’m sure with a little craftiness, hacking them will be fun too ;>

My Advice

I’d say get some: they’re cheap and they work as far as helping meet people and, as weird as it sounds, have fun with business cards. If your company wants you to use their official cards, great, use them. But order up some of these to use as well and then at least give them to “the cool people.” They’ll appreciate it. And if the business card brand-police come stompin’ around, so you’re out of $20s.

If there’s no brand-police around, then even better for you: you can just order some up and start having fun with the usually mind-numbing artifact of business cards.

Technorati Tags: businesscards, cards, moo.com, pictures, flickr, print