How to mass produce "napkin notes" ?

Imagine you just tore the corner off of a piece of notebook paper and wrote a phone number down on it. How could you mass produce that ?

My current thought it to dig up a nice clear and bold handwriting font, then start by printing out the phone number in a grid on sheets of regular el-cheapo white paper like I would use to copy a normal unimportant document.

Then I'm thinking about getting one of those old-school paper choppers like this and beating the blade up with a hammer. Trying not to dull the blade too much as I want to be able to do more than one sheet at a time, just make it irregular.



With that I could chop a few sheets at a time, the dings and stuff on the blade would give me a nice beginning to that "torn off a piece of notebook paper" look. I might sacrifice a few out of the grid so I can have varying shapes.

Then I'm thinking about what paper looks like after it's been washed in a pair of jeans and put in the dryer. Which makes me thing perhaps I should get the sheets wet and toss them in the dryer before cutting them up, but the dryer would ruff up the cut edges which would be nice.

Illegal Immigrants will probably be the most cost effective way to do such, and the most humane. The cutter does not have a family to feed.

I"m not understanding the point. Why are you trying to do this?

I want to print a website address out on it and spend a day riding around on the city bus leaving a couple of them here and there. People on the bus usually have nothing better to do than visit some website address they found scribbled down on a piece of paper with their phone.

I can get a bus pass for $4 that will let me ride any of something like 100 city buses within a 50 mile radius or so as many times as I want for the entire day. I can take a back pack with snacks and stuff and go all over the place.

I thought about using plain business cards with nothing but the address in the center, but the scribbled gimmick seems like a good idea.

Why not just find a font that looks like scribbled handwriting, then do your original business card idea. And instead of using actual business cards, stick a piece of stiff card stock paper in the printer, then just tear them a couple pages at a time by hand.

You know what would be funny? Those little sticky pad dispensers, if you could figure out a way to attach one of those to your butt, whenever you sat down it would leave the napkin note where you were sitting.

Maybe put your phone number on there too, for the chicky-babes.

I've heard that in China and Japan they are actually having little bar codes put on advertisements on the street and in print, then for your camera phone you get an application that can read the bar codes. When it reads it, it takes you to their webpage and adds their contact information to your address book. Thats kind of a high tech version of what joebert is working on.

I definitely don't want to do anything one at a time, well other than ride the bus.

The cards are probably going to be my best option for a starting point.

I might try spraying a small batch of cards with water then throwing them in the dryer. Before I do, what I can do though, is wrap a piece of 80-grit sandpaper around a block of wood and rake the edges of small stacks of the cards across that sandpaper to ruff up the edges.

My key for this is making it look like something someone was using and accidentally lost. A crisp card looks like someone was given the card and threw it away as soon as the person giving it to them left.

Maybe try spraying or splashing some dark soda pop or coffee on them, kind of all random like, to make stains. I remember back in middle school we were doing caligraphy and for a project we had to make a piece of paper look old, so me and my dad lit it on fire on one edge and dipped it in coffee, and the cool thing was while it was wet we put it on our gravel drive way and stepped on it. When it dried there were little pebble shaped ridges on that part.

ahh guerrilla marketing interesting. Its a good idea I think. I'm interested to see how it turns out. If you moisten the paper and then use a dull paper cutter it will look more like a tear and also moistening the ink once it is printed may spread it and make the paper look a little less mass produced and a little more aged and used.

EDIT: Some cool handwritten fonts. I also think this would be better then the business card idea. Less money and would draw more attention.

What you should really do is put them in the oven for a few minutes afterward, like how you make a "pirate" map with the crinkly brown edges. Everyone loves treasure.

If you really want to get creative, make your own paper. Just take your junk mail and put in it a blender with some water and hit GO! to make a paper pulp soup, then roll it out flat and smooth and squish as much water out as possible, and let it dry in the sun with good airflow. I think thats a lot more work than you're wanting to do though.....something tells me.....

I would print this on post it note sizes, then put the end in a vice.

Then use a circualr saw to cut off the end. You could do 100/200 at a time with this and it would be really jagged. The vice would protect the area where you want to have the website address.

I like the vice!

I don't know about the circular saw though, maybe a belt sander on each edge of the notes in the vice, leaving 1/8th" or 1/4" exposed.
I used to cut 48" wide masking paper into 12" rolls for smaller windows when painting houses because it was cheaper than buying 12" rolls. A circular saw used to make pretty clean cuts.