The Gift Cart Lab is silly enough to think that they have to pay me $7.50 to squeeze out fifty words about a brand-new personalized Visa gift card service such as this perfectly dull example they insist I use.
If you lack imagination, or photos, they have hundreds and hundreds of designs to choose from. And as you can see, you can come up with a pretty darned impressive gift card for someone that way, in under five minutes. But that alone would be mildly interesting, and I would not blog about it at all, much less in "Full Measure, Pressed Down and Running Over."
Some folks just underestimate their own intrinsic interestingness. Had this landed in my inbox from a friend or come from Stumbleupon or Clipmarks, I'd have babbled about it just as I'm doing now.
And just as I did a moment ago, I'd have sent an urgent missive to them asking how the heck I can sign up as an affiliate, as this is just the thing I want to market my art. Not dull family photos or pre-packaged art; I mean, how very ordinary!
But what part of "amazing collectible artifact" do you not understand? I'm an artist - and MY ART could be on a VISA DEBIT CARD!
My art is designed with malice aforethought for electronic reproduction, so I'm personally excited about this.
This is aside from the fact that it makes it possible to "personalize the impersonal," to give someone both a truly intimate gift AND the flexibility of money. Collectablity and uniqueness aside, the price - $5.95 - is in line with off-the-rack Visa gift cards, and note that unlike such cards, it is embossed with the name of the recipient and the occasion.
In other words, this puts these cards in the same realm as first day covers; you have a financial instrument that is a unique physical object, there's a "cancellation" - that is, it went from a particular person to a particular person in a documented way, and ideally, the image itself is in itself unique. Which means that whether or not it's collectablity is important to you or the recipiant, it does prove that you actually put some thought into a gift that otherwise might imply that you could spare little time or attention for them.
The image above, for instance, is a small segment of a purely electronic artwork generated from a small jpg image. As I recall, it took me about fifteen minutes to generate it using my "lite" Photoshop tools. Or in other words, if you have any photo manipulation software at all - and much out there is free - you have no excuse for doing something dull.
I'm well over fifty words now, so what the hell, let's play with their tools and add another image.
Isn't this beautiful? As you may guess, it's based on a large artwork of mine that I made specifically for the beautiful young woman in it, who snapped the original with the small digital camera in her hand. I'd really have to have it in my hands to be sure, but I know the base resolution of the process I think they are using - dye sublimation - and it should be easily as good as a photographic print. So, if you are concerned about your kids being hassled at the mall spending their holiday loot, slap their picture on a debit card - and that's one less worry.
Oh, what a depressing injection of practicality. Chalk that up to my sense of commercial duty.
Anyway, I will be exploring The Gift Card Lab with an eye toward simplifying MY holiday giving this year. I suggest you check it out yourself. If you come up with something amazing, why don't you blog about it and drop it into a comment here? You see, I think that people who come up with wonderful things deserve to be rewarded for it - even when there's profit for them involved. I believe this is such a wonderful idea, and I think that it deserves a little bit more publicity to make it really take off this season.
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