I have had the pleasure of making now 3 invites for my friend’s annual get-together called “Woo Camp.” It’s a casual get-together that he hosts at his family’s cattle ranch down in the central coast(ish) area of California. First year we did a printed piece that I created around the theme of National Parks. The following year, we went with a web based invite, and I played off the recently released film True Grit for that one. I built it using a web design software called Hype,

This year, he suggested a pop-up and my mind went racing. First off, I hadn’t made a pop-up card since elementary school, and as you can imagine, most google searches for “pop-up” came back with mixed results – mostly for browser pop-up (ad) blockers. But it sure got me thinking about the possibilities. I played with the mechanics and then thought about how I wanted the overall piece to look. I didn’t choose a specific theme, per se, but did work with a limited palette and stylized my illustrations a bit to look mildly retro. I also used the font “Tribeca” (pretty sure it was a free font I had downloaded at one point), and I got a few comments on it looking like the Jurassic Park font, which pleased me just as well.

I am overall quite happy with the end result, but wish I had taken just a little more time to send out a “beta” to see how the recipient might try to open the package. I ended up gluing the piece to the hand made envelope, and it is not uncommon for people to rip open envelopes to get at contents, so I won’t be surprised to hear of people bemoaning their choice to hack the envelope off when they went to open it. As well, I included a set of pop-up pieces on the back of a fold-out map piece, and regret that decision because it inhibited the opening of the map completely, making that portion of the presentation a bit cumbersome. On a positive note, I am very pleased with how I came up with the “lounging” guy. He’s reading a book and leaning against a rock, and when you open the card, his legs go from outstretched to folded by way of a a groove in the bottom of the page. Because he was set at an angle, I also had to use string to make the folding action work, as a piece of paper was not able to fold neatly into the proper orientation. I am curious how many other pop-up card makers utilize string for the trickier mechanics.

One of the most important things to note about this project was that it was the reason I became the proud owner of a new die cutting machine. Mind you, when I started the project and came up with the concept to have 3 panels with all these separate pieces moving every which way, I had decided that I would cut all the pieces out by hand/exacto knife. When I went to show my prototype off to the client, another friend of mine mentioned her friend had a fancy laser cutter and that maybe she could get me in touch with her to try it out and possibly help with the project. Intrigued, I took her up on the offer and came to find out the machine was not some over-the-top expensive piece of equipment like a laser cutter, but in fact, a die cutting machine, a la “Midwestern Scrapbooking Housewife” as she explained to us. It’s extraordinary. I had so much fun, and was so relieved to not be hand cutting the 660 some odd pieces for this project (there were 30 invites total), and would recommend the same machine to anyone interested in something like it. The possibilities are endless (if you like working with paper)!