KivaCards
Introduction
Tired of wandering through the
grocery store, trying to find cards which were, well,
tasteful and good to look upon? And had just the right
greeting inside?
Bored with sending ephemeral,
low-quality electronic cards?
Take a look at our range of
KivaCards. You download them, print them on your own
printer, write what you want inside them and then mail
them to friends and family.They differ from our
KivaDawgs
series, which are based on hand-drawn illustrations of
everyday life taken from the life of an extended family
of dachshund characters.
There's a viewable catalogue below
from which you can choose an image; once you find one you
like, you'll download its card by simply clicking on a
link. The cards themselves are .pdf files, readable and
printable with Adobe's free Acrobat Reader. The files are
password-protected - to open and print the file, you'll
need to buy the password; this is as simple as clicking
on the Buy
Passwords link below, which
takes you to a secure page at our online-order fulfilment
partner (Kagi)
on which you simply indicate what products you want
passwords for, and then provide your credit card
information. Having bought the password, you are free to
make as many prints as you want (for personal use
only) at no extra cost.
The ordering process is secure; if
you want, you can explore Kagi's security, policies and
modus operandi from the ordering page.
Printing
Your Cards
You can print your KivaCards on
anything that your printer can handle, although best
results will generally be obtained with glossy,
photo-quality paper.
You may find it convenient to buy
paper specially designed for greetings cards - for
example, Hewlett-Packard Glossy Greetings Card stock,
which is pre-creased for convenient folding and comes
with envelopes of the correct size. For some occasions,
we find printing on normal 8.5x11 inch glossy
photo-quality paper works fine (although you must fold
the paper yourself, and the inside of the card will
likely be decorated with the elegant little trademarks
that the vendors like to print on the back of their
paper).
You can print greetings inside the
card - to do this, you should first create the greetings
you want using the program of your choice and then print
it on the back (non-glossy side) of the card. When it's
printed, you can run the card through your printer a
second time to print the card front from Acrobat Reader.
You may need to experiment to find out which way round to
put the card back through your printer...
With any ink-jet printer, color
matching can be an issue. KivaCards are provided with
colours correct for an sRGB display or printer.
Experience suggests that letting your printer driver
treat the card as a colour photo (..which it is..) should
provide good results, but be prepared to experiment a
little with your printer driver settings and colour
matching options.
Terms and
Conditions
- We offer a
range of downloadable KivaCards products. Each may be
freely downloaded. The ownership of the intellectual
property inherent in each product remains with its
owner (normally us) and is not transferred to you by
download nor by purchase. You are licensed to use the
downloaded products for any personal, non-commercial
purposes. You may not re-distribute the products in
any form (save that you may print the products on any
media convenient and provide such printed copies free
of charge to anyone you see fit) nor by any means
unless you guarantee that recipients of such
redistributed products are bound by these terms and
conditions. If you wish to use the products for
commercial purposes please contact us either
electronically at feedback@kivadesigngroupe.com
or at
the physical mail address given below. Some of our
products are free, but the same terms and conditions
prevail.
-
- By
downloading any KivaCard product you are agreeing to
be bound by these terms.
Each KivaCard
product is copyright © Kiva Design 2000 and/or
others and/or other dates as appropriate. All rights
reserved.
- Prints
- The cards are provided at
300dpi for roughly 4"x6" images. The raw scan quality
is significantly better - we've made some very
satisfying 16"x20" prints from full-frame scans. If
you'd like a high-quality print of one or more of our
images, please contact us at feedback@kivadesigngroupe.com.
We have an Epson 3000 printer capable of producing
archival-quality prints up to 17" x 22".
-
- Freebies
- We offer two free downloads in
our KivaCards series. One
is the free example card (196KB)-
download it to see what a KivaCard will look like, and
to practice printing and colour-matching. The
other
provides a couple of helpful
hints (344KB) - one hint
shows how to add an insert to a card, and the other
provides information on how to build an envelope for
your Kivacard (or for any other card formed by a fold
on 8.5 x 11 paper)
-
- And you can now use our preview
images as images in your own electronic greetings
cards, for free. Click on the thumbnail for the image
you'd like to use, and you'll get the preview. You can
then drag'n'drop, or copy and paste the preview image
into your outgoing email. See our helpful(?)
instructions here
for more info.
-
- KivaCards
- In the table below, you can see
thumbnail views of the picures on our
cards.
If you click on a thumbnail, you'll
see a much larger image. This image is of
significantly lower quality than the image on the
card; you can judge the card quality - and the general
shape of the cards - by downloading the Mannington Roses
card; it's completely free (but still protected by
copyright).
Note that the technical information
provided with each image is not part of the card -
it's just there for your general interest and
edification.
When you click on a Download Card
link, your browser will start downloading the card. If
your browser has the Acrobat Reader plugin (so you can
see downloaded .pdf files in your browser window), you
must tell it to save the file rather than showing
it to you in the browser window: on a Mac, in Netscape,
you hold the option key down when clicking on a link to
do this. (If you don't do this, the browser will ask you
for the password to the file before you can download).
Practice with the free card.
Each card you download will have
the same general organisation as this free card - the
back will describe the card, and the front will have the
photograph, surrounded by a border (as shown in the
larger preview images). (As noted above, the technical
info is not part of the card)
Once you've downloaded a file, go
to our online purchasing page by clicking on the Buy
Passwords for Your KivaCards link below, and purchase the
password for the file; you must have a credit card to do
this. Please be sure to buy passwords for the all the
files you've downloaded since you won't be able to open
them without one; of course, you can buy many passwords
at one time.
You'll need Adobe's Acrobat Reader
to view (and print) the cards. You'll need version 4.x;
if you don't have it, click on the Get Acrobat button
below:
All the cards are priced the same -
just $2.50 each password.
We recommend that
you open the previews in a new browser window, to save
the time needed to reload this page (especially important
if you're connected by modem)
Buy
Passwords for Your Kivacards: $2.50 each
