How to make unique Moo Invite Cards

We wanted to create a set of invite cards to use as invitations for the social wine discovery project that we have been developing – adegga.

adegga moo invite cards - mic

This a description of how we thought and created these cards using imagination, wine and the services of a great company called Moo.

Step one: Opened a good bottle of red wine.

Step two: We thought about making 200 invite cards with a unique invitation code on each one.

We already knew and loved these little cards by Moo. They are eye-catching and small enough to be on a pocket or wallet. A Moo card can have pictures on the front and up to six lines of text on the back.

We thought we could use them with each invite code on the back, but we didn’t want to put each code manually on the back of each card. There was certainly a way of doing it without having to much work.

Step three: First bottle is over. On to the Porto! : )

Step four: Choosing 10 images was next. Why 10?

  • With 10 images you can do 10 sets of cards
  • You can only make a maximum of 100 moo cards at a time
  • 20 sets gives us the 200 cards we want

It is advisable to resize photos to a smaller size cropping a little bit bigger than what you want so that moo can cut exactly where you want. You should also get them all on landscape format so that you don’t have to rotate them on moo.

moo screenshots - mic moo card - mic
Step five: Generate 100 invite codes (we used MySQL and PHP) and save them to a file.

Step six: Half of Port bottle was reached and it is time to tell how we got the code on the moo card without having to write the text manually on each one.There are six lines of text on the back of each card. Some can be filled with image properties. We decided that the picture name was the property we wanted to use (it’s the easiest).Now we need to copy and rename 100 pictures to put unique codes as the image’s name. There’s a non-geek way and a geek way (scripting) to do this. We did it the non-geek way and used google spreadsheet (example file here):Google docs screenshot - mic

  • Column A – original filename (10 for each image)
  • Column B – each invite code
  • Column C – use Concatenate Function and do something like this:
    =CONCATENATE(“cp “, A2, ” /tmp/adegga_mic/”, B2, “.jpg”)

Remember to create the /tmp/adegga_mic/ folder first.

Step seven: Now you need to upload all your new photos.

We used our Flickr account. We tried using the Mac tool but only the Windows Uploadr did actually remove the file extension (.jpg) from the name of the file.

Step eight: Further personalize your card. We choosed to add our site address (adegga.com) and add the cute little invite icon that moo provides.

Step nine: No more Port, the bottle is empty. Order the cards and wait (they say 10 days but it actually took less – 6 days).

Step ten: Start giving the away your new unique moo invite cards! We did it at Reboot 9 and people love them.

Posted by Emidio on Tuesday, June 5th, 2007 in General
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12 Comments »

12 Responses to “How to make unique Moo Invite Cards”

  1. [...] wine (like an ISBN) and called it AVIN (more on this on another post). Last, I talked about the unique Moo Invite Cards that we created to start inviting some people to beta test our application. And that was [...]

  2. Hey peeps,
    Come on over! You can join the Where is Moo project! We still need people. Costs nothing except you must have a moo to have in the box and you must pay to ship the box from you to the next person.

    Hope to see you there!

    Kelly

    PS. I have no affiliation with the Moo company. This is a project I started on my own out of love for the Moo minicards.

  3. I already did some advertising for you guys, can I get an invite?

  4. […] We decided that the picture name was the property we wanted to use (it’s the easiest).[…]

    So did you figure out a way to customize any of the other properties? The only one I can figure out is the name. I really want to be able to customize more than one line….

    Thx.

  5. Can’t you batch rename using MIR (Windows) or iView (Mac)? I just made some using your idea but instead of a spreadsheet, I just renamed w/text and seq. number so they say “blogme01″ to 100 – the only thing is the .jpg is on there but that doesn’t bother me however it might be something you were avoiding using that method?
    GREAT idea by the way – I really love it!

  6. Dave,

    You can customize some of the other properties by using Exif (Exchangeable Image File Format) data.

    We tested for inserting invite codes, the Title (image title) or Make & Model (Exif Camera Model field), the first one was the fastest and the easiest one to implement, with Exif it’s a little more trickier.

    Open a good bottle of wine and give it a try, after it let us know.

  7. Cheryl,

    Pleased to know that you love our idea.

    [...]Can’t you batch rename using MIR (Windows) or iView (Mac)?[...]

    If you want sequential numbers you can use programs like those ones, but it wasn’t our case.

    Thanks for the support.

  8. [...] I’ve always wondered how they could be made more ‘useful’. This blog post on how Adegga.com managed to print unique invite codes on a bunch of cards shows how, with a tiny [...]

  9. [...] This might seem a little self-cannibalistic of us but it really is a relatively easy process and one worth sharing. Addega.com have managed to create their own uniquely coded invites for their social wine discovery project. If you have a similar requirement, read their post – How to make unique Moo invite cards. [...]

  10. Can I get an invitation, please?

    Thanks!

  11. [...] blog.adegga.com – How to make unique Moo Invite Cards (Might be useful.) (tags: moo flickr howto photos cards) [...]

  12. I’d sweetie to ascertain that too!

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