Where did the name come from?
CaZo is from “Calvin” and “Zoe”. It started with Calvin Cards, and then Zoe wanted to get involved, so we expanded.
I want cards with drawings from my family.
We all have full time jobs, but it’s fun, so let’s do it. To produce a really suitable drawing, follow these guidelines:
- Use brightly colored A4 paper (bright white).
- Make sure the entire surface is colored in. White (grey-ish) backgrounds don’t look great on the card.
- Wet markers work the best (crayons and colored pencils leave a lot of white showing through), but anything can be okay (see Superghost below, which was drawn before we knew anything).
- Take a photo with the 2x zoom under sunlight conditions (ideally on a partly cloudy day, so the sun is diffused a bit). Fill the entire picture frame. Be aware that cameras often try to color balance the image, and you want to avoid that. The brighter and more vivid the colors, the better it comes out.
- Talk to your kid about the story behind the creature. Get them to tell you how it was born, how it lived, what its powers are. How does it find food? Where does it sleep? Does it get sick when it eats spaghetti, but gains strength when it eats bugs? The more details you have about this creature, the easier it is to create the card.
- Optionally, fill out the card details, like attacks, creature names, and so on. My kids have limited patience, so you might find it’s sane to fill in the details. Goofy is better.
Costs
As long as we print on standard high-quality stock, and if I can print hundreds at a time, I can get the cost down to roughly 50 cents per card (this includes shipping from production to me). Big card producers ship 3 billion cards per year, so ours are gonna be somewhat more expensive. 🙁 But given that we don’t have distribution and retail costs, they end up being roughly the same price.
