Stick 'em Up

I've just placed my inaugural order for photo stickers from Moo.com. Moo - based in London - is a Web 2.0 app that lets you create a variety of cooler-than-print products using your own images. You may have heard of Moo's MiniCards - slightly smaller than a regular business card printed with images of your choice on the front and text you specify on the back. They make great calling cards for the artistic set. You can see samples of Moo Minis on their Flickr pool page.

But I digress. The stickers look cool - they come in a fold-over, stamp-like book of 90 (six per page). You tear out the pages and stick 'em to your heart's content. I'm thinking the kids will have a ball slapping these babies all over the house. Here's hoping they come off as easily as they go on!

Moo has apparently struck deals with a variety of leading photo-sharing sites, which makes getting access to your photos super-easy. If you've got a Flickr page, for instance, you can simply link it up to Moo and start laying out your sticker book, minicards, etc. using photos that you've already uploaded. And because the items you're printing are fairly small, you can get away with the typically lower-res photos you store on sites like Flickr.

The stickers use a square form-factor, which means you'll need to do a bit of cropping to achieve the best results. Moo offers a great interface for this that also allows you to zoom in and out to get the best crop. Having said that, I found I had better luck cropping landscape images than their portrait counterparts; your mileage may vary. As an aside, if square stickers don't strike your fancy, you can check out the round photo stickers available at Zazzle. I plan to blog on Zazzle in a future post, so I won't steal my own thunder but will invite you to check out their stickers if you're interested in an alternative.

From an ease-of-use perspective, I was very impressed with Moo's entire user experience. I'm in software development myself, and I understand how difficult it can be to make a workflow process seem very simple. Kudos to Moo for a job well done on that front. I also liked that Moo offers the option to pay using either a credit card or PayPal. Very convenient.

From project start to checkout, I spent roughly 10 minutes linking to my Flickr account, picking the photos I wanted to print as stickers, and adjusting the zoom/crop for each of the 40 or so photos I decided to print (you have the freedom to print up to 90 different stickers in a single book). The price - including shipping - came to just under $14. I did not have to specify that I was located in the US to get US pricing - the site took care of that business automatically.

I'll post on sticker quality once I receive my book in early November. If sticker quality is anywhere close to the smooth process of ordering them up, I'm sure I'll be very satisfied. More to come...