Save the Date with Vintage Postcards

I seem to get a lot of requests this time of year from wedding planners. Old postcards make great "Save the Date" cards for weddings. For smaller wedding you might be able to get away with sending original cards, but a more economical approach is to reproduce the cards or incorporate the images into a new design.

Here's the end result of easy wedding invitation project.

I offer high-resolution scans of most cards for a nominal fee, which can easily be incorporated into Save the Date cards, or any type of graphic design project.

There are tons of print shops that will do low-volume postcard printing - VistaPrint, printsmadeeasy.com and postcards.com are a few - but not all do matte finish, which is usually better for that "vintage look". Some printers can do different paper stock which can emulate the original linen cards.

Greetings from Niagara Falls

The New York Times has a nice piece today on artist Zoe Leonard's exhibit "You see I am here after all" featuring 4,000 postcards from the famous waterfall. I sold some Niagara cards to Zoe back in 2008, so I'm happy to see they went to good use. If only someone would do some installment art featuring Washington DC postcards - I have a few I could part with...

New Site Search Features: Narrow Your Search

I've spent some time over the past month improving the search functionality on cardcow.com. With over 250,000 cards now in our inventory just plain keyword-based search is often not enough to easily find specific cards.

There are now two new options available:

• Sorting of Results
  This allows sorting by best match (relevancy), and also by price or by listing date. This allows users to fine newly listed cards, or more expensive/less expensive cards quickly.
  
  
• Search Refinements
  Once you've entered your keywords to search on, you now have the option to narrow your search by category, state, size of the card, orientation, type/era, and price range

Here's an example:

http://www.cardcow.com/search3.php?section=all&substring=greetings+from+california

Now say you just want Linen cards, just click on the "Linen" refinement:

http://www.cardcow.com/search3.php?substring=greetings+from+california&section=all&typeid[]=Linen

And then maybe we want to find cheaper cards, so click on the "Under $5" refinement:

http://www.cardcow.com/search3.php?substring=greetings+from+california&typeid[]=Linen&section=all&price_search_1=0.00&price_search_2=4.99

And of course you can save these searches on the site for automatic notification, or bookmark them to easily see when new cards are available for your particular searches.

Geek of The Week

This falls more on the technical side, but I was featured as "Geek of the Week" at ServerBeach last week - they provide server hosting for cardcow.com.

In other news, the Sacramento Postcard show is this weekend - August 22 & 23.

It's a decent show, although the location doesn't get many walk-in traffic, and attendance both by dealers & patrons has gone down in the past few years. Still, it's worth checking out if you're in the area - there are several local dealers that *only* do this show. Location:

Scottish Rite Masonic Temple

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"IOU" Postcard

I thought this postcard was interesting - written on the back is a credit for tickets to the dinner theater the card is from.