Hasta La Ideas

In Issue #6 (Summer 2010), we invited readers to submit photos of themselves “shoegazing”—the classic shot of looking down at ones’ feet and taking a photo (you can still participate in the Flickr pool). Imagine our excitement when Chronicle Books contacted me and suggested that the concept be turned into a set of notecards!

Shoegazing notecards contains 20 different cards with decorative envelopes as curated and designed by UPPERCASE. To work with Chronicle Books has been a career-long dream, so to see this project completed and even co-branded with the UPPERCASE logo is amazing!

Photographs are by Andrea Jenkins, Katrina Tan, Mario Gallucci, Cori Kindred, Shawna Bowers, Kelly Anne Williams, Kristen Hewitt, Siobhan Long, Carolyn Lagattuta, Adriana Botello, Asia Lemko, Lindsay Heggie, Rachel Denbow, Alison Heal, Jay Prynne and Parul Arora.

The box design is very pretty. It was an interesting challenge to design it as I have not designed much packaging before and the project had to reflect the aesthetic of UPPERCASE magazine while fitting with Chronicle Books’ requirements and direction. To marry the diverse photographs, I decided to crop them all to a square format and use the photo styling similar to what is used in the magazine’s layouts. For texture, I used an old piece of paper, when scanned and colourized, it evoked the texture of concrete and ground. The cards are printed on a matte-finished stock, but there’s a nice gloss coating on the photographs. For added interest, I used a wavy line pattern, inspired by the soles of sneakers, for the backs of the cards and on the box bottom.

Here are the files showing the dielines:

Thank you to Kate Woodrow and Kristen Hewitt at Chronicle Books. And thank you to all the fine folks who participated in the call for submissions and who graciously shared their work on this project.

Click here to purchase Shoegazing Notecards