We at the Digital Room Blog are all about postcards this summer – postcards to send to your friends, to inspire your fellow artists, and to promote the best deals around. To share our enthusiasm for custom postcards printing with all of our readers this season, we’ve compiled some of our previous posts on postcards into this post, as well as holding our second ever blog giveaway contest to thank our loyal subscribers!

Read more to check out our inspiration posts and practical tips for postcards in the past; then, scroll down and find out how you can win free printing of up to 500 postcards!

Custom Printed Postcards Inspiration Roundup, and Free Postcard Printing!

Design Inspiration:

• 27 Artistic Promotion Postcards’ Designs
  
  Postcards that are out to promote don’t have to be all about sales pitches, as you’ll see in this collection of beautifully creative and promotional designs.
• 15 Tree Postcards’ Designs for Arbor Day Inspiration
  
  We wouldn’t be running a business if it weren’t for trees. To celebrate Arbor Day, as well as Earth Day and other environmental causes everywhere, we’ve collected these tree postcard designs for eco-friendly inspiration.
• 15 Vacation Postcards’ Designs and Photos for Inspiration
  
  Ever been to a vacation so amazing, you forgot to stop and take pictures? We hope this post will make you remember to get clicking at least occasionally next time!

Direct Marketing Ideas:

• Recipe Postcards for Marketing: 5 Uses and Ideas
  
  Put unique and delicious recipes on high-quality postcards, and you’ve got potentially powerful promotional materials that can connect you with your audience in brand new ways. Here are five ideas for five different industries on how you can go about using this idea.
• Bright, Sunny Ideas for Your Own Summer Postcards
  
  So you’ve got a direct mailing campaign ready, or you’ve simply decided to send postcards to your friends to keep in touch – and you don’t have an idea yet on what to put as your custom postcards’ design. Since it’s summer, this post just might give you that inspiration you need!

Here Comes the Contest!

What’s Up For Grabs:

Free postcard printing! Specifically, full color offset printing of 4″ x 6″ postcards on premium, 14 pt. glossy card stock, on both sides. One grand prize winner will get 500 postcards, and three others will get 200 postcards each.

This giveaway is open to US residents only! You have to be 18 or above to enter.

What to Do to Win:

• Blog about this contest, and link back to this post! You can simply tell your readers the details of this contest, or better yet, add details on why you deserve to win. Post an image of the postcard photo or design you want to print, tell everyone about your last postcard printing experience with Digital Room, or go into a story about a unique experience with postcards in general. (If you’re having trouble coming up with ideas, check out the resources we’ve listed!) The more interesting your post is, the better your chances of winning!
• Once your post is live, leave a comment on this post with a link back to your published post.
• Promote this contest with us, on Twitter (please include your tweet in the #giveaway trending topic), social bookmarks, blog networks and the like.
• Leave the links proving you’ve promoted this contest via comments on this post; you can link to them all in one comment or through several. It’s the number of times and/or ways that you’ve promoted the contest that we’ll be counting, not the number of times you’ve left us comments.
• Your cumulative score (blog post quality + promotion efforts) will be tallied by our blog team and compared to the other contest entrants’ entries. Once we decide on the grand prize winner and the three other lucky winners, we’ll publish another update announcing the results!

We’ll be running this contest for one week, so deadline for entries is on August 11, 2010, 11:59 pm PDT. There’s not that much time left, so hurry and start making your awesome postcard-inspired post – and remember to subscribe to the Digital Room Blog before you go!

Edit: We’re changing the deadline to August 18, 2010, 11:59 pm PDT to give more time for interested bloggers to make the best post they can write. This is the last extension we’ll be making though, so make that winning post as quick as you can!

Update: THIS CONTEST IS CLOSED!

The results are in! The Digital Room Blog team has decided to award the grand prize to DJ of Crummy or Yummy; her post on Yummy: Recipe Postcards has some really cool ideas on what else to do with recipe postcards not covered in our own post.

Runner-up winner is Cathy Parker of Psychic Mama Indigo Child; her post here contains some fascinating information about the history of postcards, as well as some beautiful image examples!

Winners, please wait for the email that will confirm your win, as well as instruct you on how to get your prize. Thank you to everyone who participated, and watch out for more contests from the Digital Room Blog by subscribing now!