DESCRIPTION 10 Resolutions for 2010 Postcards CLIENT Andy Babb DATE December 2009 DESIGN CREDITS Andy Babb PRINT CREDITS Grand Palace Silkscreen TYPE CREDITS Sugar Pie and Neutraliser

QUANTITY PRODUCED 250 (25 sets of 10 cards) PRODUCTION COST $200 PRODUCTION TIME 1 week DIMENSIONS: WIDTH × HEIGHT × DEPTH 6 in × 4.25 in PRINT METHOD Silkscreen PAPER STOCK 140 lb Cover Muscletone Kraft French Paper NUMBER OF COLORS 3 spot inks: Gold, brown and white

When holiday cards abound, there is often a desire to stand out from the rest by creating something unique. Andy Babb was thinking about this when his brainstorming led him to the end of the holidays, that final day when most of us seek to get back on a certain path and voice resolutions for the new year to start.

At first, riffing on the double-meaning of resolution—a decision as well as an industry term for image quality—felt perhaps a bit too precious or cute, but I decided to suck it up and have fun with it anyway. Generalizing from my own personal experience with pie-in-the-sky resolutions that were never fully realized, I imagined polar outcomes for the ten topics I chose.

With time and budget in mind, as well as personal limiatations Andy got to work, finding a way to bring to life the lofty resolutions (labeled as “Hi-Res”) and the more realistic, less idealistic actual outcomes (“Lo-Res”).

The biggest challenge of the project was time. The concept came to me the week of Thanksgiving and I needed to get the cards produced far enough in advance of 2010 so as to not be totally irrelevant. I gave myself a little over a week for design. I didn’t want the fronts of the cards to be merely typographic, I am not a natural illustrator, and had zero budget for imagery. For all but one of the images I used, I sourced from public domain photographs and illustrations in the Library of Congress online archives. For production, I worked with Grand Palace Silkscreen, who did a quality job expediting the printing.

Surely a little humor goes a long way when your mailbox is overflowing with the corny, the expected, the safe and cute messages sent in by family and friends — no offense.