Wow, mummy, you MADE these – JD, 5
Today, I’m really pleased to be sharing with you our experiences with a lovely new site, PaperShaker, from the people who brought you Moonpig and Photobox.
It’s an interactive website, designed to help you create completely unique and personalised cards and stationery to celebrate and share key moments, such as a birth, wedding, party or ‘just because’.
Being a techy type with mild delusions of being a proper photographer, I jumped at the chance to have a play.
In the end, I settled on two test designs – a tea party invitation and a 6th birthday invitation – each priced at £9.90 for a pack of 10, plus £1.49 P&P. Here’s how I got on…
Tea Party Invitations
For the tea party invitations, I chose this ‘Tea Party‘ design:
Designing is, easy – you get a column down the left hand side with all clip art, patterns and so forth and you just drag, drop, resize and position them onto your design in the main window. You can keep checking the front and back, or zooming in and out as you go until you’re completely happy.
It’s clear that a lot of thought and care has gone in to the PaperShaker designs. They’re hand drawn in vector, which means they stay beautiful no matter how much you stretch them up and down, and they have a character and style to them that stands out from mere ‘clip art’.
Here’s my finished design. As you can see, I added a teacup next to the teapot, changed the background colour, and then added my images without margins.
I’m genuinely impressed with the high print quality and 300gsm card with a varnished finish. The photos came out with a very true colour and came exactly to the edges on every single car with no skew or missing bleed.
And here’s the back. Cute, huh? The only change I made was to the background colour. It was very easy to change the text and the whole interface is set up in such a way that it helps you to stay inside good design principles, producing a finished result that looks neat and well proportioned.
Birthday Party Invitations
Next, I started work on JD’s party invitations. Here’s the ‘Bleep! Bleep!‘ design I started with:
Here’s my finished design.
As you can see, I used the drag and drop clip art to replace the watering can with a smaller robot and added an extra speech bubble and roundel. Again, it’s simply a case of drag and drop.
I also changed the bottom design to a stripe pattern that echoed the pattern on the upper balloon and also on the 6, bringing the whole thing together. It was all really easy to do and I’m rather proud of the result.
Since I’d used a blocky design on the front, on the back I switched to a blocky background to bring it all together. A small tweak that made a big difference.
So, what do you think of my efforts?
PaperShaker cards offer same day dispatch on cards ordered before 2pm, full phone support, 100% money back guarantee, free envelopes, sample cards for just £3, UK based, staffed and operated, cards printed in the UK from FSC certified sustainable forests.
And if you order today using special discount code AMUMMYTOO you can 25% off (valid until 6th October 2013)! So, what are you waiting for?
Disclosure: this is a sponsored review. All thoughts are my own. All posts are 100% honest.