Avian’s Blog

Last year when I was in London I've seen people giving around cute little cards. After some questions I've learned about Moo, a web service that can be used to order a number of printed paper things, from those mini cards to stickers.

So a couple of weeks ago I gave it a try. I've also heard nice things about their web site and since I'm still a bit cautious about using all these new-style interactive web interfaces for anything serious I wanted to see how a good one looks and feels like.

Well, the final impression was really good. Everything looked and worked correctly in Debian's Iceweasel. I've uploaded some images and was able to crop and adjust them in browser. At first I had some problems because I had images that were already cropped and Moo kept putting the edge of the images off the card. However their FAQ quickly cleared things out and I got a JPEG template which I used to prepare the margins of my images correctly in GIMP. If I wouldn't want to mess around with that I would be finished with the order in a couple of minutes. Nice. No needless extra features, only what you really need.

This is also the first time I got the impression that I'm really using an international service. They have a flat rate for shipping anywhere in the world - something I haven't seen anywhere else before. Another nice thing is that they properly support international characters! They printed my name correctly, which can't be said for some companies in Slovenia where many still struggle with that on their web forms (I must remember to post once all the different ways I find my name wrongly printed in my (ordinary) mail).

Anyway, I also liked the way how they add an impression of a personal touch to the whole thing. You see comments like "Excited? We are." here and there. It's interesting how I never got the feeling that they're overdoing that and I usually have quite a negative reaction to companies trying to fake emotions that way.

They also say that they care about the environment and that they only use paper from sustainable forests and so on. Nice, although I find their choice of a plastic box for shipping my cards a bit conflicting with that mission. It's made out of recyclable polypropylene so I guess it's not that bad.

So, if I'll need a bunch of colorful cards, I'm definitely going back to Moo.