I’ve always enjoyed creating my own personal birthday/thank-you cards rather than buying mass produced ones, though as I’ve got older I don’t always manage to find the time to make them. I’ve made a few over the last couple of months using Photoshop & Illustrator and I thought I’d post them here. Each card style is a bit different from the other two.

- This first one was for a friends birthday. I wanted this card to be business-card sized so I could transport it easily in my wallet. I chose to use ants (because they are small and fitted on the card) carrying a strawberry (to represent the birthday present).

- The next card I made was for my friend’s wedding. I wanted to keep it simple so decided to just use Illustrator to make a black & white line drawing of the bride and groom; tracing their heads from photographs I found. On the printed version the image itself was a little smaller, I’ve just enlarged it here so it’s easier to see!

- Finally I made a card for my brother’s birthday. For this card I found a suitable photograph of him from Facebook then replaced each of his friends’ faces with the faces of famous people who had the same birthday as my brother (but obviously from different years), which I listed inside of the card. I think he found it quite amusing!

That’s all I have for now but I’ll undoubtedly make more in future. On another note, I know I don’t update this blog as often as I used to, but you can find more regular updates featuring my musings and links to things I like on my Twitter feed.

Things that I have seen and like from the past few days.

- A fun project involving cameras left on park benches in New York. Love the random selection of people and imagery that spontaneously erupt from simple ideas like this.

- This company called botanicalls sell little arduino based sets which can sense the water content of the soil supporting your plant and send messages to twitter accordingly. A nice little idea, but not sure if I’d pay the $99 for a single kit at this moment in time. I’ve been getting more into Twitter recently after many months of not joining/twittering. There now seem to be more people ‘on it’ that I am genuinely interested in hearing about/telling things to; so I’m finding it an amusing past-time.

- These World War II aviation photographs are pretty awesome. I believe that my grandfather worked on this sort of thing during the war so I may see if I can find some of his shots and post them online.

-  I can see myself getting a Kindle or similar device in the next few years, there is so much great free literature online, and being able to get a book as easily as a music download would be brilliant. This would be a bonus feature.

- Other bits and bobs; a super-fine way to display photographs, a 224-word pallindrome from Demetri Martin, and a nice collection of the characters found on subway/underground trains.

- Videos; Johnny Flynn sings and wonders the streets of Buenos Aires in another great video from La Blogotheque, a clever advert from Loewe, flippin’ awesome puppetry creates this very impressive dinosaur (though I think the desaturated video adds to the authentic appearance), and finally, Louis CK tells it like it is.