Pixel Postcards from Stube Umlauts

In stationery shops and pop-up stores I like to linger at the postcard racks and browse. I turn one card or another over in my hand; I skim the motifs and the lines. Some puns and turns of phrase land with me, others feel too flat. Often I don’t find anything for my “use case”, or simply nothing that fits me. What if my cards were sitting here? What style would be mine? What humor would I bring to it? At some point ambition got hold of me – I wanted to sell postcards too.

A style I hardly ever see represented was on my mind: pixel art. A character, an animal, a pop culture reference – broken down to a handful of squares on a grid. The brain adds the rest all by itself: it closes the curves, fills the gaps, and recognizes. The picture is really only finished in the viewer’s head.

At the end of 2023 I spent a week sick in bed. I was exceedingly bored, even watching series got dull. When the bed grew too monotonous, I sat down at the kitchen table with a slight fever. That’s where it all came together: I opened Figma, set up a canvas with a grid, and placed squares on the vector grid; pixels, more or less. Out of this creative distraction, the first ten designs came about by the end of the week.

The Caterpillar Wants Its Fill

Not every shape can be carried by pixels. A cat, a dog, a crab can – a handful of squares renders them convincingly. The Very Hungry Caterpillar, on the other hand, is round, through and through. On the grid I simply couldn’t draw its unmistakable roundness, no matter how I pushed the pixels around.

Once I had recovered and showed the drafts to my partner Julia, I asked her for advice on my “caterpillar problem”. She had an idea. She drew two antennae and an eye on top, right across my squares. All at once the design had a character I couldn’t have given it on my own. I’d been wanting to do something creative together with her for a while anyway – from then on it took its course. We christened it: Stube Umlauts.

The name was the most banal part of the whole project and still took the longest. “Studio” was ruled out quickly, since every other digital or analog workspace calls itself that. We wanted to combine something funny with something old and German. Something hardly anyone says anymore – and a Stube, a parlor, is simply the cozier, warmer version of a studio.

In one of the series I watched while I was ill, the word “umlauts” came up. The German plural is Umlaute; English just tacks on an s. Sounds wrong, and that’s exactly why it’s right.

From Digital Draft to Physical Paper Product

Figma was wonderful for pushing drafts around. It computes in the RGB color space, though, and is built primarily for digital assets. A print shop computes in CMYK, the four colors that sit as a layer on paper. When the colors are translated from one space into the other, it’s precisely the luminous tones that get lost. So I laid the cards out from scratch again in Illustrator, with a few millimeters of margin to trim away. But what paper did we actually want to print on?

Definitely not pure white. The postcards were meant to stand out not only visually but also to the touch. After some searching we landed on Munken Pure Rough, 300 grams – a creamy, slightly rough sheet. An online printer would have offered us that too; but it was meant to be a local product. So we went with Gutenberg Verlag und Druckerei in Leipzig. A few days later a stack of proofs of the ten designs lay on the kitchen table.

Just Ask in the Shops

There’s a handful of shops in Leipzig that we love escaping to. A few weeks later we walked into exactly those, with a stack of postcards in our bag. At the counter we asked roughly this: “Hi, we’re Julia and Johann, we’ve got some great postcards here. Would you be up for selling them?” We had no business plan. Our goal was to see our postcards in the racks of our favorite shops one day. And at Tschau Tschüssi, at Vielfach, and at Weikert Studio, that actually came true!

But the yes also meant putting a legal framework in place for accounting and invoices. So in 2024 we founded Stube Umlauts GbR, a simple German partnership.

Weikert Studio Leipzig

Weikert Studio isn’t really a shop for postcards at all. Stephan Weikert stocks selected fashion, fragrances, and artisan goods, carefully curated. Would our pixel cards even fit stylistically next to leather, merino wool, and muted colors?

To my surprise, Stephan liked the aesthetic straight away. He promptly made us an offer and bought a few dozen cards across various designs. Once they stood prominently in his entrance area, they were exactly what the shop had perhaps been missing – a splash of color among earthy tones.

Spring Exhibition at feingemacht Halle

Another route was less spontaneous. feingemacht in Halle an der Saale is a shop and café for art and design. Every six months, exhibitors are sought and selected to fill the space. We sent off an application in late 2024 and were accepted a short time later. From February to June 2025, our small rack stood there between ceramics, prints, and jewelry.

Of Reprinting, Packing, and Pausing

That’s roughly how it went for two years. Over time new bookstores came along, outside Leipzig too; at some point there were cards in Stuttgart and Munich. For a while we even had an Etsy shop through which we sold a few cards.

The card that sold by far the best in all that time was, of all things, the caterpillar. „Ich bin so satt, ich mag kein Bla… Oh, Kuchen!“ – “I’m so full, I don’t want any bla… Oh, cake!” – the one I hadn’t managed on my own, and the one it all began with.

What we underestimated was the organizational effort. Cards run out, so: reprint. Reprinted cards have to get to the shops, so: pack, drop off, or ship. Alongside two day jobs, work often piled up into the weekend. With the Etsy shop it was most obvious – every handful of cards meant a trip to the post office.

Making Stube Umlauts better known would have meant: advertising, advertising, advertising. Instagram ads would have been the next logical step; plus stickers, notebooks, more products, more contacts. At that point we decided against it – as dear as the project was to us, we didn’t want to give up our evenings and weekends for it.

And that was okay. It was never about making money. At the beginning there was this simple, maybe defiant thought: if other people can sell postcards I don’t like, then I can do it too. We managed to see our products standing in shops. Goal achieved.

Setting It All Free

In early 2026 we decided to stop printing and selling. Letting the designs disappear into a drawer would be a shame. So I’m releasing 25 designs – download, print, give away, sell. Under the Creative Commons license CC BY 4.0, which essentially means: do what you want with them, just credit my name – Johann Schopplich.

The print templates are ready as PDFs, either with 3 mm bleed or with crop marks. Send them to an online print shop or, nicer, to one around the corner. If you’re unsure about the paper – this is how we had ours printed:

• Format: DIN A6 (10.5 × 14.8 cm / 4.1 × 5.8 in)
• Paper: 300 gsm Munken Pure Rough (or similar)
• Color: 4/4 full color, double-sided, digital print

If you print the cards, I’d love to hear about it. And if you sell them in a shop – even better.