Week 11 - House Wallpaper Cards

This week* I created a set of stylish cards based on wallpaper in our house to give out at parties to people we want to live with.

*I finished this project and wrote most of this in week 11 while I was still living in SF, but I only published it in week 19

Tools I used:

• The amazing wallpaper in my house!

• iPhone 13 mini - to take photos of the wallpaper

• Photoshop Elements - to edit and crop the photos

• Canva - to play around with designs and add borders

• Figma - to design the back of the card

• QR code generator - to link to the house application

• Moo.com - to print super high quality cards

Context:

We live in an amazing old mansion that has very special original wallpaper. Almost every room has a different print, all intricate and beautiful, and the attention to detail is incredible, so I wanted to capture and celebrate the essence of this wallpaper. My first try at printing the wallpaper was to make myself a vinyl Macbook cover, it looked good enough that other people asked me to make them one too:

I noticed that guests to our house often comment on the wallpaper. What logically followed was to create memorable cards based on the wallpaper that direct people to our new resident application.

Process:

This one was fairly straightforward: take photos of the wallpaper, edit and crop them, then have them printed. There were design decisions to make at each point:

• Artificial or natural light (not all rooms have good natural light)?

• Some designs consisted of repeating or tessellating patterns - what zoom level looks best?

  

  

  Some unedited wallpaper patterns

• How much should I touch up the images? Some of the colours are fairly muted, and some of the wallpaper has reflective elements that looks weird in photos

• I had ~20 or so interesting patterns from different rooms. How many should I include?

• What else should I include on a card? Nothing but the wallpaper? Additional design elements? Luckily I had a designer friend look over my shoulder and she helped me with a few options. I think the subtle border frames the pattern well and looks more pleasing.

  

  

  Playing around with borders

• Design choices from Moo.com - I went for ‘Luxe Business Cards’, square format, black seams, and rounded corners:

  

  I paid $65 for 50 premium cards.

  Here’s how they turned out:

The back of each card has a QR code and link to apply to live at our house:

Learnings:

• Less is more when it comes to design. The wallpaper was already very busy, so just the subtlest of touches made it shine

• Printing images is tricky, you don’t always know how much border will be chopped off

• Creating a physical thing is super satisfying. Bonus points if it’s also useful!

Next steps:

• Give the cards out to the housemates and let them distribute them (or keep them!)

• Apply this same process to design 52Weeks branded cards that I can give out to people when I tell them about my project

• I also got a pack of mini stickers with the same designs… stick them on everything

• Make some paste-ups