Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

I haven't the foggiest clue as to when HP launched this service, but I was looking at HP printers today and noticed this free service for the first time. It's a browser-based Flash design tool that's surprisingly sophisticated - it's based around templates, so you don't have complete design freedom, but since most of us aren't designers it's nice to start with a template. The service starts with two broad categories: Projects for Home, which includes calendars, greetings cards, and iron-ons, and Projects for Business, which includes business identity kits, business cards, letterhead, and shipping labels. Once you select your project type, there are up to a dozen templates to chose from. I selected a single-page calendar as my project, and was impressed that they allow you to upload your own photos and import them into the project. It's all done in a slick Flash-based tool that allows you to drag and drop the photos into the project, and to crop, rotate, scale and flip the photos. Nice! Equally slick is the fact that once you upload your photos, they're available across any template you select. Read more...

Moo is a delightfully quirky printing company based out of the UK with an equally quirky product that they call "Minicards" that are incredibly fun, especially for digital photographers. Minicards measure 28mm wide, 70mm tall, and they're printed with a matte laminate finish on 350g/m2 paper (think business card stock). The print quality is extremely high, with no discernible dot patterns that I could see. So what makes these little cards so much fun? Everything! First off, unlike pretty much every other printing process for cards that I can think of, they allow you to upload up to 100 images for your 100 Minicards. Or, if you want, you can upload only 10 images and you'll get 10 Minicards of each image - or any combination thereof (you get the idea). They have a great interface for pulling photos from your Flickr, Facebook, and other accounts, or you can upload images off your computer. If you dont' want to use your own photos, they have a variety of ready-made designs. On the back you can have up to six lines of text, and a choice of several small icons. I wish there were more icon choices though! Read more...