JPG Magazine: Stories: Personal Post: Where it all started

Where it all started

By Karla Jacobs

17 January 2008

Ever since we were small, my sister and I have been fascinated with those little changing pictures we used to find as prizes inside Cracker Jacks boxes. One day, a couple of years ago, she said to me, I'd really like to find out how to make those "little flippy things," but not make them cheesy. Make them out of good photos or better yet, make them personalized, so a person could flip from his dog to his cat, or grandma could see each of her grandchildren making faces at her.

Well, being a curious person I looked into it and was told that you had to have them made overseas, and you had run large quantities of the same image to make it affordable...like 5000 units of the same two pictures. And so the dream sat on the back burner for a few years. And then, earlier this year (2007) I started hearing a buzz that, thanks to advances in digital photography and printing, there may be a way around the old methods of production, and I started digging deeper into the technology.

I pieced together what I learned, made a lot of costly mistakes, and came up with the proprietary Flipograph method of creating custom-designed prints that flip, like magic, from one photo or artistic image to another. I even started delving into making 3, 4, and 5-part Flipographs, 3-D Flipographs, and experimenting with adding typography, graphic elements and more. What a blast!

At this point, we weren't sure if anyone else would be as excited about Flipographs as we were. So we made a dozen or so different ones using digital photos from my collection and took them around to various frame stores, camera stores, and gift stores. We showed them to everyone we encountered, (always carried a package of 6 or 8 of them in our purses). We weren't trying to sell them at this point—just looking for feedback and advice.

Without exception, the response was wild. Everyone came up with dozens of applications where they could see a market for Flipographs: sports action photos, jewelry, ornaments, postcards, business cards, party favors, souvenirs, you name it. The best thing is, everyone who held a Flipograph in their hands smiled and usually said something along the lines of "ooh" or "cool" or "wow." This was quite gratifying and never failed to make US smile.

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