IEEE CG&A

 

My January and March 2002 columns were about Interactive Pop-Up Card Design, and my program to help out making pop-up cards. Although you can view them on the computer, my goal was to help people create their own original pop-up cards to actually assemble in real live and share with friends. Here are a few more figures from that issue. You can get more technical information here, and see more of my columns here.
Real Pop-up Card Real Pop-up Card


A few years ago I sent out moving cards. The image on the left is a blank, or mock-up, for my cross-country card. The base was a map of the US, with North Carolina near the bottom and California at the top. The three vertical risers were drawn to show the Blue Ridge Mountains, the Rockies, and the Santa Cruz range. The tops were cut to give the feeling of mountain peaks. The horizontal band was the road, drawn black with yellow stripes and a picture of my car. Contact information was in the lower-right.

The picture onthe right is a working mockup of another moving card. When the card is opened, the letter pops out of the mailbox and the red flag goes up. I wrote my phone number on the flag, and my address on the envelope.
Real Pop-up Card


When I moved to Seattle, I mailed out the card above. The card was held closed by the type of string-wrapped-around-a-disk mechanism that is used for inter-office envelopes. I made the two disks by punching them out of thick paper with a disk-shaped punch, and then fixing one to each end of the card with a grommet. To install the grommet, I first punched a hole in the card, then pushed through the grommet by hand, and tamped it on the inside using a hammer and a grommet tool, working on a soft piece of wood. For string I used mint-flavored dental floss: it's strong, it's a pretty color, it's easy to grip and turn, and it smells minty! When the card is closed, you don't realize it's going to grow quite a bit vertically when it's opened. I made the traditional postcard look with Photoshop, illustrating each letter with my own artwork. The background is Mount Rainier.

All of the images above are photographs of real cards. The images below are synthetic, computer-generated images that I made with my pop-up card design assistant, several of which were modeled on real cards that I've made in the past.
Rendered Pop-up Card Rendered Pop-up Card


On the left is a card for friends who were going on a sailing trip. A personal message was "written the waves" by using a displacement map in Photoshop to make my message ripple as though riding on the water. The icebergs and ship pop up when the card is opened.

On the right is a new-year's card. The dragon pops out on the left as the card is opened. The dragon is a photograph I took of a really terrific hanging store decoration in a store in Beijing. I just traced the outline by hand and used it pretty much as I photographed it.
Rendered Pop-up Card Rendered Pop-up Card


A couple of years ago I held a party to celebrate the solstice, and sent out invitations like the one on the left. The idea was supposed to be that each of the four plates represented a season, and that evening I set out foods of that season.

On the right is a birthday card. The joke is partly in the caption, which reads "Happy Birthday to someone who always knows how to keep balanced!" The rider is perched on a unicycle on a tall stem. When the card recipient turns the serrated red wheel at the left, a dual-cog mechanism causes the rider to rock back and forth, while the spokes of the wheels made a pretty Moire pattern. The pictures shows the rider at two different points.
Pop-up Card Layout An important issue when making real cards to give to people is to make the hassle of construction as low as possible. To cut and construct 40 cards of even moderate complexity can take a month of weekends. My pop-up card design assistant provides a number of handy design aids, including color-coded placement tabs, cut lines, and packing the pieces efficiently on the printed page to minimize the number of sheets that need to be cut.
The physical cards at the top of the page were constructed with traditional tools: scissors, knife, glue, grommets, paper, and board. I illustrated them with pencils, crayons, markers, and watercolors. The synthetic images began as models I created with my interactive Pop-Up Design Assistant. I then textured the cards with Adobe's Photoshop, and rendered the cards using discreet's 3dsmax 4.