Letter we received from Snail Mail My Email
Isn’t that adorable?! Even though I did come up with that lovely message, I didn’t actually write it down and drew the little illustration: Snail Mail My Email did it for me. Snail Mail was a month-long worldwide collaborative art project that took place from July 15 – August 15, 2011. It allowed people to email them a letter, which was then handwritten by volunteers along with customizable options. I of course asked for an illustration of the first thing that came to my minds: our YCD mascots (if I remember rightly I asked for a doodle of a grey cat, a ginger cat and a B&W dog sitting on top of a yellow car). The letter created was then mailed to the recipient (in our case, us), completely free of charge.
When I first came across the project on Twitter I thought it was pretty cool and worst mentioning on The Blog… but then I thought: “Wait, what if I sent a letter to The Blog readers themselves through the art project to tell them about it?” Much much cooler, and I got to encourage the art project that, by the way, had 234 volunteers send 10,457 handwritten letters to over 50 countries around the world, spanning across all seven continents… I also got to surprise Marc since I hadn’t told him about the letter (didn’t want him to be disappointed if it hadn’t showed up!). When him and Desmond went to the postbox this morning they were quite surprised to see a nice yellow envelope addressed to Yellow Car Design instead of the usual bills!
The success of the Snail Mail My Email project shows that, contrarily to all beliefs due to the over-usage of e-mails, the old mailing system isn’t dead. People still enjoy finding a “real” letter in their mailbox. I am myself quite a snail mail fanatic who insists on checking the postbox everyday (especially when expecting cheques from our clients 
) in the hope of receiving something amazing. It happens once in a while when Marc’s mum sends him his mail from England and decides to include a few Galaxy chocolate bars and a bag or two of Minstrels… That, believe me, makes the little walk to the postbox well worth it! So now, get to your pens and paper and start doing what you haven’t done in a long time: physically write a letter to say “hi” to someone. And if you want to be extra-nice, add a little bar of chocolate in the envelope: you are guaranteed to make that person’s day 100 times better!
Vick @ Yellow Car Design
