Dogs are Cuter than Cards

The hoodie seems to have made it to K'tantan in one piece. How effing cute is this dog? He has pretty cute parents, too. I've known his mom since our Oberlin College Kosher-Halal coop days (oy!) and we share an ex-boyfriend, but now she's about to get her masters degree in violin performance from Penn State and has probably the best classical musician website I've seen ever, designed by her boyfriend/K'tantan's daddy.
Look at her website. And if you need a violinist (and/or violin teacher...she was music education undergrad and she's good with kids), contact her and give her your money. She deserves it.

Another Dog Hoodie

This one was a gift for a friend's boyfriend and their joint-custody dog. She's Jewish and he's Japanese, so she wanted a combination of the Israeli and Japanese flags. Obvious solution would be white background with the two blue horizontal Israeli flag stripes and the big red circle from Japan's flag where the Star of David normally goes on Israel's, but dogs and white sweaters are usually a bad idea (dog + white sweater + five minutes = no longer white sweater). SO! She said to switch the blue and the white and make it even more abstract than the hybrid flag already was going to be.

Again, forgive the awful photography. I was in a hurry, since I thought I'd already mailed it once. (Lesson learned: if friends are giving you business, treat them as part of your business. Otherwise they get lost in the shuffle and you become a big fat suckyhead.)

DaLove for DaFont

Whenever I tell people about dafont.com I feel like I'm giving away some great trade secret. But that's a little like assuming that showing people the library means they're all going to write best-selling novels.

I am a font nerd. It probably happened long before I worked for American Greetings, but while there I had access to their entire collection of proprietary and non-proprietary fonts, and sweet mother of Garamond it was beautiful. A sentiment's feel can change entirely based on the look of the letters used.
Case in point:Same "three little words," but four very different sentiments.
Playful, romantic, plain (Times New Roman just for contrast, though it can be a useful font and has its own feel and indications, t00) and homicidal. You don't send the second one to your brother or the last to your mother (unless you're me and think it's funny).

This is all terribly important (well, not Darfur important) for my cards, especially the ones I do that are just text with no other art (i.e. the "don't spend it all in one place" and "thank you" cards I do with the wallpaper envelope things). It's been particularly on my brain because now I'm making "have your people call my people" cards to go with business cards as little somethings to give when/after you meet new networky types and want them to actually remember you and your business card instead of sticking it in their pocket/wallet and losing it forever or just not giving a flying fig. I spent quite some time on dafont rejecting font after font for being not friendly enough or too casual and on and on and once I'd narrowed it down to a few I tried them out on mock-up cards and found a winner: Labtop by Apostrophic Labs. We'll see if it stays the winner long-run, but for now, the first batch of "have your people call my people" cards are getting printed up that way and hopefully listed on Etsy this weekend.

And where do I get all my fonts? Dafont.com. They are free. Yes, that's right, free. Font designers are wonderful creatively sharing people. Since I've started selling my stuff I try to only download the fully "free" fonts instead of the "free for personal use" ones so I don't do anything illegal/evil. I should try to contact the designers of some of my favorite fonts and interview them for my blog. That would be swell.

I need to eat something now.