Nancy Gershman, digital artist and photographer 

I'm a third generation painter. But unlike my Viennese father and grandmother, I'm the first to dip into a digital tool box, and the first to do art for your sake, and not my own.

I opened Art For Your Sake in 2004 as a mecca for shutterbuggers seeking that One Perfect Photo, and found that your photos just floor me ...

Influences? The MAGNUM photographers of the 30s, the photo-collages of Jacques Prevert, Polish poster art, the great photo-retouchers of the Stalinist period, and of course, Madison Avenue.

In my previous life I was in advertising, and in some sense, I'm still in advertising, suspending disbelief and turning things on their head. Only this time, I'm doing it in the service of comfort and joy.

  Invitation Designer, Joy Baer



Very much the perfectionist, Joy was born with a terrific sense of aesthetics, further shaped by her visual communications work at The Illinois Institute of Art. Joy's whimsical illustrations and font treatments pair beautifully with your collaged photo invitations.

My first love affair with cutting and pasting was for my college thesis which called for a "biotectural" interior collaged from architectural and gardening magazine clippings. My next big collage epiphany was 20 years later, when I created a tender series of photo collages for my firstborn's bar-mitzvah. This time, in the absence of the "right photos" (that is, endearing shots of Sam posing with family members or friends which simply did not exist), I made them myself from family photos I had in albums. Using this method, I was even able to reunite Sam with his grandmothers, Lola and Ilse, who had since passed away.