A set of note cards made from users’ photos, using Pinhole Press.I have more than 22 gigabytes of photos stored on my computer. That translates to roughly 3,000 pictures gathering dust on my hard drive. Sure, the majority are throwaways, but there are a few gems in the bunch I would love to see outside my LCD.
Last year I wrote about a variety of ways to blow up snapshots into oversize canvases and murals, but for those looking for more diminutive keepsakes there’s Pinhole Press. The company, based in Cohoes, N.Y., specializes in turning your snapshots into chic notepads, calendars, day planners, diaries and greeting cards (starting at just under $2).
While there are plenty of companies who do this sort of thing, it’s Pinhole’s clean layouts and fresh typography that sets them apart. We’ve all grown accustomed to having a plethora of customization choices offered to us, but the company’s limited options are refreshing for those of us who’d rather leave the designing to the professionals.
Pinhole Press is an extension of Mohawk Fine Paper, a 75-year-old family-owned company that in the last 10 years has become the place to go for premium papers made for digital printers. While the company does a large part of its business with big, online photo companies, they wanted to see if they could improve on the experience of personalized paper goods.
In the fall of 2009, Mohawk teamed up with LabPrints, a Cohoes software company that builds apps to help digital photographers manage their growing databases of images. The company, which Mohawk now owns, developed an online service that allows users to drag and drop images onto specific products. A handful of templates were designed by Rosebrook/Peters/Funaro, a product and brand design firm based in New York City that has done work for Aveda, Vera Wang and Gucci.
Once you pick a template, you simply upload the images you want to include, drag and drop them into the gray boxes provided, and then edit any text boxes provided. Other than zooming into images, there’s nothing else you can manipulate. The options are limited, but sometimes less is more. The result is a greeting card, calendar or photo journal that looks as if it was put together by a professional, not a hack on lunch break.
“The toughest thing for us over these last 12 months has been to stay true to that clean, crisp look,” says Bart Robinson, vice president of Pinhole Press. The company often has customers wishing they could have a little more control over the products’ design, but for Robinson, “The reason we differentiate ourselves is because we don’t give you the ability to do that. At the end of the day 85 percent of people haven’t made a photo product online, and we think some of those people are on the sidelines because it’s just too intimidating.”