Love, love photocards
[Tracy Smith] I love photocards. I love sending them and I love getting them, especially from long-time friends {hint, hint} who I don’t get to see all that often. That’s why I’m really excited about a new source for custom cards: Pinhole Press. There is one thing I usually dislike about photocards: most of them come printed on flimsy paper or *gasp* photo paper. If you’re going to put the time and money into holiday cards, they should look like it!  Plus, I tend to hang onto photocards, so they need to stand up to the task of being on my fridge for a year. Pinhole Press cards are print

Thanksgiving post
[Alyson Kuhn] As holidays go, Thanksgiving gets my stamp of highest approval in several categories. I like Thanksgiving philosophically, gastronomically, socially, and, last but not least, postally. A literal and figurative kuhnucopia of philatelic delight! If your recollection of the Thanksgiving story can use some refreshing, I recommend Art Buchwald’s famous column, reprinted annually in The Washington Post and other papers. I first read it in the International Herald Tribune, in the mid-70’s, in Paris, on Thanksgiving. Ostensibly written to help the French understand Thanksgiving, it was one of the drôlest choses I had ever read in a newspape

Sending thanks {with all the trimmings}
[Alyson Kuhn] This Thursday, my toast at the Thanksgiving table will be to Oprah Winfrey, for proclaiming on her eponymous show many years ago, that there is no statute of limitations on sending thank-you notes. I didn’t hear Oprah deliver this dispensation myself, but I have fond memories of the occasion on which I heard about it. It was the Fall of 1994, I had recently moved to Chicago to work for Paper Source, and Sue Lindstrom in her wisdom had insisted that I teach a workshop about letter-writing. The attendees at my first class included a mother-daughter duo {Marilyn and Eliza W.}, and  the daughter had seen the show and shared Oprah̵

So Noted: The end of print? Not!
[Laura Shore] As I meandered through Control:Print, the intriguing new exhibit at Parsons School of Design, curator and designer Lucille Tenazas reminded me with a laugh that she had predicted the end of print back in 1992, when she was a member of Mohawk’s design council. She had feared that new technologies would render our paper-based practices obsolete, with only business cards {engraved, of course} serving as a tactile reminder of our former creative selves. Twenty-seven years later, here we were, celebrating print as the centerpiece of a unique collaborative exhibit between artists and designers at Parsons in New York and the Royal College of Art in L

Taking it to the street
[Bill Grant]  Across America, historic Main Street communities have fallen prey to the generic strip centers and massive malls that define urban sprawl. In the process, small core downtown districts, once the heart and soul of their local communities, have vanished. In an effort to support the revitalization of our own historic downtown district and to increase the accessibility of our design services, Grant Design Collaborative opened its own retail venture, the Store at Grant Design Collaborative, in a vacant storefront in our building in downtown Canton, Georgia. About 45 miles north of Atlanta, the Store is equal parts retail and product design incubator. We aptl