antanova: And the cows go - the blog of a web developer

And the cows go

"Lovely," is what I thought when I saw Moo.com. Ok, so it's just the website of a printing firm - and one that offers only two very restricted product lines. All that is fact, but it seems so much more than that. Have they cracked the secret of creating a great brand? It would seem so.

There offering consists of two products: mini cards (only 70mm x 28mm) and note cards (100mm x 100mm). I'm afraid all you history buffs will have to look up the corresponding inch count all by yourselves.

What's the secret? Well, perhaps part of the secret is in the simplicity of the offering. They offer only the two lines at the moment. They plan to do more, I think, but I doubt they will stray too far from a small simple selection. Another part of the appeal is that unlike many printers, one simply buys the cards in packs of 100. No set-up costs, no extras other than the postage. That means that although the per-card price is not cheap, the price of a run is low at £9.99 ($19.99 US). Which makes it something people can play around with. The simplicity is carried on in the design of the card: one side is for text. You can choose from a very small selection of about ten colours, and put up to five lines of copy on there, with an icon if you choose.

The real magic though, and the bit I have been saving until last is the picture side of the card. On that side, you can put a photograph. But that's not all: you can log into your Flickr account through the Moo site and select up to one hundred different photos to go on your cards! That's right, you can have each of your one hundred cards display a different photo. Amazing.

I was dead keen, and coincidentally needed some business cards, so I got together some images I had taken during the previous year on holiday and out and about (Taipei, Mallorca, London zoo and Watford). Cropping them down to fit the cards is something you can do on the Moo site, but in this case I decided to do it myself, adding a white bar at the top where I put my logo. I uploaded them to Flickr and did the magic on Moo.

When they dropped through the letterbox, I was well pleased! They are small but perfectly formed, and have a nice matt laminated finish on them.

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