Forgot you’d subscribed to this feed? Well, hello again!

We have two new designs from Isa Buenavida, find them on the designs page and visit her blog (it’s in Spanish but there are still pretty pictures if you can only read English).

I’ve also added a design of my own. If you’re thinking of writing to people this christmas, why not do it on christmassy Letterfu paper? The new design can also be found on the designs page in both A4 and Letter variants.

Don’t like the design? Think you can do better? Please do! You can get the Letterfu source from the source page. I’m working on tools to make it easier to make your own design so look out for that stuff, coming soon.

I was delighted to find out today that Denise, a friend here in Edinburgh, actually stumbled upon Letterfu in her internet travels. Then she spotted my name at the bottom. I feel like this project has come full circle now that somebody I know in “real life” has found the website entirely of their own volition (or, well, because of StumbleUpon — cheers guys).

Oh, one more thing. I’ve turned off comments on the blog. Thousands of spam messages and a signal-to-noise ratio of … well, about 1 to 1000 was completely unmanageable. If there’s something you’d like to say about Letterfu drop me an email - I’d love to hear from you and GMail tears through my spam like a mail sorting machine through letters. … Just kidding.

All the best,
Alex

I’ve added three designs by Tippy Pennell to the Designs page - thanks Tippy!

Addendum - I’m quite a keen Twitter user and am young and naive enough to follow random people for funs. Here’s my Twitter page.

If you’re still subscribed to my feed, wow. Thank you, personally from me. Here’s your reward - I’m actually writing a post.

I can’t believe how little I’ve worked on Letterfu in the past year. Ridiculously enough, I’m trying to live at least four lives and the upshot is that Letterfu just doesn’t get the attention it deserves. I’ve been honoured by each and every email I’ve received from people interested in using Letterfu for commercial projects or community mailouts, and can’t quite believe it when people say they’ve been using Letterfu for months.

I didn’t send any fu for a long while until quite recently in the middle of the Lake District, when I had a sudden desperate need to write to a long lost friend (no joke). There weren’t any shops for miles and all I had at my disposal was some lined paper from a pad that I was using to revise on. Thankfully that was enough for fu and I could write the thing, address it, stamp it and leave it at the Youth Hostel reception before I had a chance to overthink the letter or chicken out.

I return to Letterfu now to make one small (but I hope significant) addition to the website - the source files from which I generated the original designs. Get them here.

I was reticent to put up the original source because, like most citizens of the internet that are still afraid of the medium and their place within it, I was afraid that someone would run away with my designs and ideas and do far better with them than I did. Of course, that’s the point of releasing the source in the first place. It took me a long time to realise that trying to keep the source to myself served only to stifle Letterfu’s chances of flourishing at all.

So here they are. I’m deeply sorry to everybody I kept waiting. I have one demand and one request - take note of the license before you mess with the designs (it’s all explained on the page), and let me know how you get on so I can share your designs with the rest of the world.

In case you don’t hear from me for another year, all the best.
Alex

Hello, all!

At long last, I actually have some news to announce. I haven’t been able to make updates to Letterfu since it’s initial release for the simple reason that I was foolish enough to go public with the site in one of the busiest parts of my university year. Thankfully the academic year here in Edinburgh is winding to a close now, and at long last I’ve got time on my hands to progress with Letterfu.

Firstly, THANK YOU AGAIN for the massive response and positive feedback from everybody that’s visited Letterfu and written me emails. In the interests of conciseness, I will have to save a list of more specific thankyous to various bloggers around the internet until a later date.

Now, updates. I released updates to all three designs today - they are as follows:

• No “ADDRESS” text. Some people called for international versions of letterfu, which caused me to realise that the “address” text above the box for writing the recipient address is a bit dumb. I’ve removed it, so I hope mailers outside of the UK and America will find that useful.
• Letter-sized design now bigger. Lots of people pointed out that folded letterfu was too small to meet the United States Postal Services regulations. “Mary” wrote with a solution in the comments to the previous blog: print the Letter-sized layout at 110%. Well, now there’s no need. The designs are now 10% larger and I’ve moved the folding guides to ensure the envelope holds as tightly as possible when it’s folded up.
• The return address box is gone. Commenters on the first blog pointed out that in the US, the return address was required to be on the front of the envelope. Here in the UK we can stick the return address anywhere we want. I decided the easiest solution was to remove the box entirely. It doesn’t stop you writing a return address if you want to.

You might be able to guess that the Letter-sized version of letterfu was somewhat untested at release - I had to make do with guesswork and chopping down A4 sheets of paper to approximate Letter paper. This second version called for greater creativity in that department, and I managed to cut some actual Letter-sized paper from pages pulled from the centrefold of a notepad. Joy.

Lastly, I’ve written a script that takes a background design and automatically lays out the letterfu guidelines and boxes on top. This is how I updated the first three designs. I don’t want to make it public just yet (I finished writing it about an hour ago) - first I’m emailing back everybody who wrote about producing their own designs to invite them to beta-test the system for me. Hopefully this means that we’ll be seeing new letterfu designs soon - and from graphics artists much more talented than myself!

Keep your eyes peeled for more - the summer is long and I’ll have time to kill between the flurries of activity.

Thank you everybody who has visited, written about the site and bookmarked it on del.icio.us - there’s been a massive surge of traffic for the past forty-eight hours that has brought over 10000 people to the website - something I just couldn’t have imagined before it happened.

In response to the huge amount of interest and also the emails I’ve been recieving from people interested in producing their own designs (which perhaps I can feature on the site in the future), I’ve set up this blog in order to publish news and other things. If you’d like to receive updates on the website, bookmark this page or subscribe to the RSS feed.

More soon.

Alex