Squids KRUKKER and [blank] got featured on STLToday.com for their work with Bill’s St. Louis greeting card & postcard business, Big Small Town.

Check out the article or read behind the cut below.

Photographer sees humor in cityscape
His art features light-hearted captions

By Erin Taylor
Wednesday, October 8, 2008 1:05 PM CDT

Bill Michalski’s first greeting card was of a rope-light nativity scene in the snowless front yard of a south St. Louis home near Interstate 55 and River Des Peres.

“The little Lord Jesus asleep in the zoysia,” he called it.

The image represents the “every house” of St. Louis, one of the thousands of tiny bungalows that line the streets of dozens of city neighborhoods. Michalski tried once to go back and find the house but couldn’t distinguish it from the others.

“I’ve always worried that the people whose house it is will recognize it,” he said.

Hopefully the homeowners would have a good sense of humor about it. That’s the point of Michalski’s “Big Small Town” greeting cards and postcards. Michalski, 30, grew up here, knows the inside jokes and plays off the stereotypes people have of places around town. One of his biggest-selling postcards is a picture of a vast parking lot with the caption, “Greetings from Chesterfield.”

“Nobody’s been offended, although one guy didn’t get it,” Michalski said. “He was like ‘Wasn’t there a better place to take a picture in Chesterfield?’ Of course there was. It just wouldn’t have been as funny.

“Most people buy them to send them to people who live there.”

Michalski has been creating his line of greeting cars and postcards since he was in college. The images aim to capture the sort of things only a true St. Louisan would appreciate. Some of the pictures are staged, such as the one of Michalski holding a plate of mostaccioli and green beans for a wedding card. So was one of an Interstate 64 (Highway 40) detour sign mounted in an alley near Michalski’s home in the Tower Grove South area. The signs, he said, came from a friend.

Other pictures are spontaneous shots: a Christmas tree stuffed in a trash bin (“Happy belated holidays,” the card reads), a peaceful picture of cars and trees covered with snow on Shenandoah Street … the sort of things that make living in the city worth the 1 percent city earnings tax.

Michalski was born in Glendale and started to explore the city as a high school student at St. Louis University High School. By the time he had graduated from Webster University with a degree in graphic design, Michalski was calling the city home.

He had started making cards from images of the urban cityscape but without the same sense of humor he has now.

“A lot of what I do is try to find the ordinary stuff that’s special in an un-ordinary way,” Michalski said.

He began making the cards in 2002, and after sharpening his skills as a graphic designer at Washington University, he started “Big Small Town” in 2006. His friend, Karen Czmarko, writes most of the captions for the greeting cards.

“She has a natural gift for translating the humor of my images,” Michalski said.

Michalski would like to take his company full-time but says “even if I saturated the St. Louis greeting card market, I’d still have to expand.” And that would mean branching out to another city unfamiliar to him.

“I want my cards to embody the spirit of the area, not just another picture of a famous landmark,” he said.

Michalski recently took a trip through southwestern Missouri looking for funny town names. One of his newest images is of a clock for Tightwad Bank in Tightwad, Mo. He also is branching out into the baby business with birth announcements containing a picture of a friend’s baby in a roasting pan with the caption, “The bun is done.”

Michalski’s cards can be found at a number of local stores including the Bug Store, Fifi’s on Delmar Boulevard, Grove Furnishings, Local Harvest Grocery on Morganford Road and the Dogtown Gallery and Frame Shop. He’ll also have a booth at the Tower Grove Farmer’s Market from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 11.