Archive for 'personalized postage'

Personalized Postage Stands Out

Saturday, February 5th, 2011 at 11:31 am  
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You have a handful of mail. Let’s guess that most of it is junk mail, if your life is anything like mine. After you get rid of the junk mail, you still have a couple of envelopes. Let’s see, there is a phone bill. The other thing looks like it has your college roommate’s handwriting on it. You wonder if she had her baby yet. You’ve been out of touch so she wouldn’t necessarily call you or even email you, specially not with a new baby to keep her busy.

You glance at the envelope again. Wow, what is that postage stamp? Looks like a mother and a new baby. Gee, it really looks like your old roomie! How strange is that! You tear open the envelope, carefully not tearing that stamp, and sure enough the baby has arrived and everyone is fine. And your old roomie explains how she came to be on the personalized postage.

Well, if you have looked around this website at all, you know that personalized postage is a new trend growing in popularity. People love the reactions they get from others when they use it. Yes, it does cost a little more than regular ol’ postage, but look what you are getting, a rare edition, so to speak!

If you have some reason to stand out sometime, do think of using this special customized postage. Click on the image of the cute kids to the left to find out more! Of course, it doesn’t need to be used just for children. Your artwork, your dog, your vacation trip to exotic locales, all are potential personalized postage!

Personalized Postage and Scrapbooking

Thursday, September 27th, 2007 at 12:12 am  
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There are two ways that scrapbookers could use personalized postage like that available from stamps.com. Well, scrapbookers are a creative bunch and probably could come up with many more ways but these two ideas are a start:

1. Relatively simple digital scrapbooking or photo-collage images would look nice. You could start with either a digital scrapbooking page or a handmade one which you then made digital by scanning or by taking a good sharp photo of it.

For example, this image is a small section of a photo-collage that I did about a town in Mexico, as it looks on personalized postage.

2. The custom postage itself could be excellent  to use in a scrapbooking page. Now, this could get pricey since the minimum order for a set is for twenty, so you’d want to have a use for the personalized postage you didn’t put on your page! But in most cases, there isn’t a problem using them up. If the scrapbooking page was a gift for a family member, for example, you could give that person any leftovers.

Creating personalized postage and doing scrapbooking call for such identical interests that there’s bound to be a lot of ways to combine the two art forms!


Your Photos on Real Postage

Personalized Postage for Party Invitations

Wednesday, September 26th, 2007 at 7:56 pm  
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When you have a special party, an enjoyable way to announce it is with a mailed invitation with personalized postage on the envelope. While no doubt the majority of party invitations just go via phone or email, sending out invitations doesn’t take a lot more time and definitely makes your event stand out.

Personalized postage isn’t hard to make. Just upload an image from your computer to stamps.com (the image to the left of this text also takes you there) and then you can choose a border color and arrange your picture how you want it. Order online, choosing whether you want regular postage or maybe for  postcards. They’ll soon be in your hands. Naturally, you do have to do this a while before you want to mail the invitations.

You can use personalized postage for all sorts of events: birthday parties, holiday parties, graduation or retirement celebrations, a party when you get back from a big trip, and more. (See other pages on this site with wedding invitation tips.)

  • Birthday parties for adults: personalized postage with a picture of the person as a child would be fun, specially if the photo you choose looks enough like the adult that people realize who it is. Putting something like “Look who’s 40!” under the picture could insure that and would be a very good idea if you use a baby picture! If you are using a photo from more than a few years ago, you can scan it in or take a picture of it with a digital camera to get the digital file you need to create the personalized postage.
  • Birthday parties for kids: how about a picture of the child doing something fun, like climbing a tree or riding a horse? A close-up of a smiling face always works.
  • Graduation party: If the graduate has access to their cap and gown a couple of weeks or more before the big day, you could get a photo in time to have the personalized postage  made. If not, a picture of the person smiling or holding a symbol of their achievement, like a book, would be nice.
  • Retirement party: You could do lots of different things with a nice photo of the retiree, perhaps with a partner. The person could be standing in front of an RV, on the golf course, or anything else that suited their interests. With the use of software like Photoshop Elements or another program, you could put them on a golf course in another state!
  • After a special trip: Order personalized postage with your favorite photo from the trip.

Would You Call Personalized Postage a Digital Art Form?

Wednesday, September 26th, 2007 at 7:55 pm  
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Digital cameras have transformed the world of photography in a lot of marvelous ways. We send photos of our travels or the kids to our friends… we make photo-collages and scrapbooking pages… we upload our pictures to sites like Flickr where we can share them with the world.

And now postage is on the list of many things we can do with our digital images. We upload our files to Stamps.com, order our postage, and soon have them ready to send out. It’s great fun, but does that qualify personalized postage to be called art? If you call them art, would you also call a t-shirt someone designed with an in-your-face political slogan a work of art?

No doubt people have been arguing about what art is for generations. Here’s what I think; see whether I can persuade you.

I didn’t think of personalized postage as art when I began this website. But as I have been researching the many ways people are using these stamps, I came across some writing on the design elements of a good photo stamp… hmm that sounds like an art discussion to me!

That got me thinking about just what the design elements for good postage are. I often suggest on this site that you keep it simple. Beyond that, there’s the matter of a pleasing balance of shapes and colors. Another factor is how the design looks on the corner of the envelope.. would it look better if you flipped left and right?

These things do fall into the categories of photography and the digital arts. I noticed that one day when I was submitting custompostage.net to a variety of website directories. Each directory had its own lists of categories and I had to choose one to put this site under. Photography seemed to be the best fit. If they had a further category called digital art, I used that.

That got me thinking about what I said at the start of this article, how personalized postage is part of the digital art explosion growing out of the ever-increasing use of digital cameras. Given all this, I have ended up feeling that while not all postage is particularly artistic, I would place the field of custom postage squarely within the field of art… digital art!

Babies Look Great on Personalized Postage

Wednesday, September 26th, 2007 at 7:22 pm  
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Babies are adorable wherever they are, and they are a favorite subject for people who create personalized postage. New parents have noticeably less time than they had beforehand, and it doesn’t take long at all to select a digital photo — often there are plenty of those! — and to upload it to one of the sites where you can get it turned into postage, which is then mailed to you.

In choosing a photo, remember that the final size of the art on the postage will be just over an inch squared. So a close-up shot of the head or just the face of the little one is always a good bet. If you have an older child, you could get two heads into the shot. Choose a picture that is in focus, and select one where the baby has a big smile or at least an interesting expression. (I once took a photo of my two-year-old daughter when she was crying, and as she grew up, she always specially looked for that one in our family album. But I don’t think she would appreciate seeing it on personalized postage!)

It doesn’t have to be the parents who make these, of course. If you are a grandparent or other relative of the baby, or a friend, you could do it as a gift for the parents.

Even though the emphasis of this website is on how to create and use custom postage, it’s worth mentioning that there are websites where you can upload images in much the same way as you do to the postage websites, where you can create not only postage but also tshirts, mugs, and other items with personalized pictures on them. If you do that, you have more latitude with selecting a photo, because the design on a tshirt, for example, can be 8 inches by 10 inches.

But back to personalized postage. Once you have them, how to use them? One of the best things is to send them to family members or other people who are related to the baby or know the little one. Put them on a postcard — they come in different denominations — or on a gift package. Revive the art of writing letters, even if you just say something like, “I thought you’d enjoy seeing Ryan at four months, Love, Sally.”

Just about everyone loves babies, wherever they turn up. Surprise someone with personalized postage showing a baby you know and love! Maybe your PhotoStamps® will be the cutest ever!


Your Artwork on Personalized Postage

Wednesday, September 26th, 2007 at 7:00 pm  
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Artists, take note! If you like to draw or paint, or if your children do, it could be great fun to put one of your creations on a personalized PhotoStamp®. It’s quite easy to do, and doesn’t take long. It’s legal postage, available in seven denominations, for postcards to packages.

First you need to have a digitized form of your art, that is, a .jpg or other computer file. If you have a scanner, that’s one way to get it, but we find that taking a digital photo is often easier. If you take several photos as long as your camera is out anyway, then you can choose the best one, paying attention particularly to being in focus.

If you don’t have a scanner or digital camera, chances are someone in your family, a friend, or a neighbor does. Maybe you could offer to give them some of the personalized postage you will end up with in exchange for their help.

Once you have the image, if you use Photoshop Elements or any other graphics program, you can open the file in that program and adjust the color, crop it to be square, and generally play with it in any way you want. This step is optional, though.

Next, you upload the file to the company that makes the actual postage. There are several companies, but I prefer the market leader, the company that pioneered this process, Stamps.com. They walk you through the steps of uploading, adding a border to the image, and ordering. Your personalized postage will soon be gracing envelopes, and your family and friends will be enjoying it.