Wednesday, December 4, 2013

Moo.com > review

Offering

Moo only offers a few different options for business cards, and that's fine because most people don't want wooden, plastic or metal cards.

A very good thing about Moo is that they offer you to get started with only 50 cards, which definitely helps when you're still iterating on your design or want to try out a company.

Another awesome feature that I did not use is that they allow you to print different backsides on a business card.

This enables you to order cards for 5 (or 50) different persons in one batch, or to add some diversity to your cards, like showing off your designs for designers.

Customer Service

So far, just fine, acceptable delays, very polite and forthcoming.

I expected them to deliver on the reprinting of my cards ...

Well they messed up. The reprint is much better, but there are still cards that have problems (about 10%), and the shipping was one day late, plus one day weekend delay, i.e. I got my cards after the event was over.


Shipping Delays

They were one day late, apparently related to a printer malfunction - I'd have appreciated the communication before asking, but I got an answer fast and the cards as well.


Printing Quality - first try

The 4 paper layers stick together ok, the edges and corners are fragile as expected, but impeccable at delivery.

The paper is fine, the texture looks nice and the touch is good, it doesn't seem as exceptional as they make it up to be on their product page, I guess a paper expert will have much more to say about this.

The cards are very slightly warped, completely invisible to all the people who don't study your card from a distance of 10 centimeters.

The precision is great at a normal distance, but if you study closely, it's not that great, like standard photo printing.

It could be a limitation of the source (they requested 300dpi) image, but since I couldn't send svg I'll never know - and it did not matter for me.

The color (I only used black ;) ) is bad, as in worse than my home cheap laser printer on normal settings.

There is serious white bleeding on the edges (mostly the top) of every card, plus scratches on some.

The white background on the other side of the cards is ruined for all cards but two (the top card from each 50-stack), by the black ink from the backside of the previous card, light smears that ruin the cards.

Printing Quality - second try

The color is still unimpressive, there is much less bleeding on the black backgrounds, and most of the cards had a properly white background.

Nothing else changed from the first try.

Evolution

Apparently, Moo.com had many failures in the past, but have been continuously improving, from unusable software and buggy printing back in 2010, to misaligned cards in 2011-2012, to my color problem today, to hopefully fixing all of that and future problems.

Still, they have a long way to go to become 100% trustworthy printing partners

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