We sent out holiday cards this year, first time in years, and when we saw Kathy at the Margaret Explosion gig on Friday she told us our card looked just like one of the photos we had taken in Spain. Kathy is a craftswoman, a hands-on sort and creative. I said, “it is one of my photos.” I didn’t want to read too much into it but it was clear Kathy didn’t know we had the cards made. That fact would have been obvious if we hadn’t cut the cards in half before mailing them out.
I did commercial art my whole working life and I remember how much pressure was relieved when websites came along. If you made a mistake on a project you could just hop online and fix it unlike a print job where you had to eat 10,000 catalogs with the wrong phone number printed on it. Well, we did the mechanical files for our Christmas card, a 7″w x 10″h piece that folds horizontally to 7″w x 10″h, and uploaded it in a flash. Only when the box of cards arrived did I discover we had backed the card up wrong. When we opened the card Eduardo Chillida’s quote, (“Isn’t planning a way to steal the present’s greatest mission?”) was upside down. Considering that quote was so fitting to our lack of planning we debated whether to send them out that way and hope someone got the joke or, as we decided, to cut the cards in half so the image was on the front and quote on the back.
We did receive another comment on the card. John Gilmore emailed us. “Thanks for the card. Perplexing I must say.”
Happy Holidays!
1 Comment
Now that I know the whole story behind that card, your solution of cutting the card is so much more befitting of that quote. I love that!
I saw the quote as a very personal choice by you, and should have put 2&2 together, since the image of Chillida’s sculpture was one of my favorites. Your solution cinched the deal!