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Use Your Photos to Make Note Cards of New York City
>> When in New York, you can buy a wide variety of city images in the form of postcards, note cards, posters, picture books, calendars, and CDs (to name a few things). While these images are professionally packaged, today's technologies make it easy and economical to produce your own.
Pictured above is a sample of note cards I created from photos taken during two recent trips. Some are of family and others are of locations in New Orleans. Because images like these are personally created and selected, the resulting note cards become really fun to use for such tasks as announcing that you've returned from vacation, as well as for invitations, holiday greetings, thank-you notes, and, of course, quick notes.
Since I've begun creating and using my own cards, I now appreciate the benefits of snail mail. I also discovered that I can actually compose greetings by hand, rather than typing, although I miss the backspace key.
Linda Haack, a world traveler who lives in Racine, Wisconsin, creates calendars of trips she's taken with friends and family, which she gives as gifts. Recipients of her personalized calendars are always very likely to save them forever. If she just sent souvenir calendars or cards, however, they probably would have ended up in the recipients' drawers.
Paul Kelsey, from Dover, Ohio, contacted me in March to see if I could identify the exact location of a picture he took while visiting New York. Through email, I learned that his family shares photos to create note card sets. To show me what they do, he sent me a note card set of his recent New York City visit, a few of which are below.
It turns out that the Kelsey's own a printing brokerage business called "Kelsey's Kreations." Among the many things they once produced were recipe card packages sold at craft shows that came bundled with a cookie cutter. Today, the business is primarily run by Mrs. Kelsey, but the whole family participates with product ideas and images.
After they began creating and sending their own personal, laser-printed note cards, their family, friends, and business acquaintances began asking for copies. Eventually, they packaged and commercialized their cards, with each set representing a specific theme. The back page of each card identifies the site, its location, and the name of the person who took the picture.
The Kelsey family cards are packaged as highly polished, cellophane-wrapped sets. They categorize their sets on a colorful brochure, which is accompanied by a price list. For more information, contact:
Creating Your Own Note Cards
I like to create one or two note cards of a favorite photo, then continually change pictures as time goes on. Because I continually change pictures, rather than create a set of, say, ten cards per image, I've found that digital printing services are too expensive. The reason is that these services charge by multiples of a single image, rather than print one of multiple different images in a single order. This expensive limitation is strange when you consider that digital printing services have no problems reproducing individual photos! (If anyone knows of a digital printing service that has reasonable prices for a series of individual note cards, contact me and I'll list it here.)
 To cut costs and have more fun by "hand crafting" my own cards, I bought Avery "Matte White Note Cards" paper at Staples for $18. This package makes 60, 4.25" by 5.5" cards and includes 60 envelopes. This deal works out to $.30 a card.
You can print these cards at home on a reasonably-priced inkjet printer. My Canon PIXMA, for example, only cost $60 at Target earlier this year. If you don't own a relatively new printer, now is the time to buy one! Quality is high, printing is fast, and if you buy a Canon, I've found that its color ink cartridges last a surprisingly long time.
Avery provides a free Microsoft Word template to help you position your artwork so it matches the paper's perforations and scoring (bending areas), but I found the template difficult to use. Instead, I used a layout program (in my case, Photoshop, but there are many very inexpensive programs available), and measured my own template by creating an 8.5" by 11" blank image, which I divided in quarters. I then copy and paste each image over the background created by the template.
A sheet provides two note cards, each of which can be printed as portrait (tall) or landscape (wide). The only skill you need is knowing how to rotate your pictures by using your layout program. Your layout program should also have a tool that lets you shrink or crop your images so that they fit in the allotted space.
Do not attempt a print "bleed" on an inkjet printer, although I believe you can achieve this with a laser printer. A bleed means that your picture prints to the edge of the paper. Unfortunately, to do this, inkjet printers spray ink on the printer platen exposed next to the paper. That, in turn, which creates an ink puddle that ruins your printer.
Feel free to contact me if you have any questions about creating your own note cards. I'm sure you'll find creating them very satisfying, and by doing so, you'll share handmade mementos with family and friends that might be more personal than just dumping photos into photo-sharing sites.
Karen Little
Article and photos by Karen Little. Pictures on the note cards by Kesley's Kreations were taken by that company. First published on 7/14/2009.
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