It can be a lot of pressure to create the perfect Christmas card each year—especially when your family decides to try a Christmas Photo card! Here are some helpful tips to capture the perfect image for the perfect cards!
-Pay attention to the size of the photo, as many Christmas Photo card creators require a minimum/maximum for you image specs.
-Be aware of your background. Give thought to where you want to take your photo. Don’t overlook a mess or a clashing color in the background.
-Take multiple shots! This way you have a few options to choose from, or you can even Photoshop everyone’s best picture together to create a masterpiece!
-Think of a unifying theme for your picture. Whether it’s clothing, colors, or a vibe, consider adhering to a specific theme as a group. Committing to a group theme might look more put-together or polished than if the photo is haphazard. You can control the direction of your Christmas Photo card with just a little forethought.
-Put it all together with the same attention to detail that you took the photo with. Make selections like the card stock, border of photo, and message inside. . .with the outside in mind. This will make the Christmas Card feel complete.
You company is in the process of ordering this year’s Christmas cards. But there are so many options! If you are feeling overwhelmed, here is some advice on how to choose your small business’s Christmas cards.
If you already know that you would like to send out Christmas cards for your company—as opposed to “Happy Holidays” or “Season’s Greetings” cards— that is already a huge decision made. But now what? There are still so many options! The next thing to consider is which kind of Christmas card you’d like to send. A religious card? A traditional red and green? Silly? Industry-related? Foil and embossed? A winter scene? Ornaments? A photo-mount of your employees or your store front? Once you narrow that down, the other choices should be easier.
Next, you’ll want to think about which color ink or foil to use for the inside of your company Christmas cards. Examine the design you’ve chosen and pick the most complimentary hue. Also, you might want to consider the text you’ll have featured inside. Will you include your logo? Then maybe company colors will look sharp. Are you adding signatures? Which color will you sign in or are you having your signatures printed inside? All these small decisions come together to form your perfect card. There is no right or wrong—just whatever you like! So have fun and dazzle your recipients with your company’s own style!
There is no place like home for the holidays. And why not make sure your company name and logo is in everyone’s home? Design Your Own holiday card and send it out to all your perspective clients, your employees and vendors. With a little in house graphical work you can really create something magical.
Your company name and logo is your identity. And let us face it Christmas is a magical time that everyone enjoys. Why not meld the two together this season and not only get good will out there…get YOU out there. Another thing you can do is take a company picture. Maybe everyone wearing some Santa hats, maybe some elves mixed in. Slap a little “Happy Holidays from” your company and you have a whimsical card that will get you on the side of someone’s cubicle all season long.
Keep in mind there are many other ways to do this. You can do a card that has a regular “Christmasy” type image on the front with some text that has your company name on it as well. Either way works just fine. The key is do not forget to tell everyone happy holidays and do not forget to tell them who is saying it to them.
The holiday cards that we offer at the Gallery Collection are more than just cards…they are works of art. Each piece of art goes through a creative process from design to actual custom Christmas cards. These cards are some of the finest, high quality cards available. Below highlights the creative process for the very popular Design 157CW, Holiday Toy Shoppe Christmas Card. We’ll show you how this card went from an original design to a beautiful masterpiece.
The original sketch for Holiday Toy Shoppe is a black and white line drawing of what will eventually become a playful, vibrant, colorful card that brings back fond childhood memories of the holiday toy store.
The artwork appears framed here, showcasing what the final design may look like after production, encased in a lovely border with a joyful holiday sentiment.
And here is Design 157CW, Holiday Toy Shoppe Christmas Card in the complete and final form. The black and white line sketch has made it’s transformation into a colorful winter wonderland, complete with border and holiday wishes. The Creative Team at the Gallery Collection is responsible for this holiday magic, making sure that all of the artwork we use for our personalized Christmas cards is made to be beautiful enough to hang on your wall.
We have arrived at the third and final part of our “Making a Winning Doodle into a Dazzling Christmas Card Design” series. So far in Parts 1and 2, we’ve gone through the process of scanning the image, cleaning the image up, changing the artwork to fill space, and separating the image to determine colors and finishing techniques. We’re almost done, and soon we’ll have a beautiful holiday card.
The creative team has gotten together to give critiques and advice on how they feel the design should look. At this point in the process the Creative Coordinator decides which colors and styles will be tested. There are many different colors of paper stock, and some of these different colored stocks will be tested with various inks or foils, depending on the design. The card is sent to production so the creative team has a chance to actually see all the different choices, and decide which will be the best-seller.
Here is a look at the design in the early process of separation to see which colors or foils would look best.
When the cards come back from production there are many different styles to choose from. This is an important step in the design process, as the Gallery Collection is always looking for the most visually appealing and creative Christmas cards. Here are some examples of the different foils and colors that were tested to determine the final appearance of our winning card.
Some of the different color combinations to choose from included buff cards with green foil, and white cards with multi-colored foil.
The Gallery Collection also offers a wide array of beautiful dark stock cards. Since there were so many options we just had to test them all!
The creative team will once again gather to review and discuss the different holiday cards. They will decide what works and what doesn’t work in terms of color, style and finishing. They will also decide if any revisions need to be made to the final design. With so many choices and options, this isn’t always an easy process. But in the end it’s worth it, as the Gallery Collection has some of the most visually stunning cards available.
After much discussion, a final design is chosen. It combines the beauty of Lauren’s winning artwork with the amazing skills of our creative team. Two amazing cards were made from this one beautiful design, and they will truly take your breath away!
Design #798CW - Holiday Tree Christmas Card
Design #730CW Snowman Surprise Christmas Card
Every design that graces the cover of our catalogs and is displayed on our website must adhere the high quality standards of the Gallery Collection. Changes are made to most designs, whether it’s sizing, color, or addition of foil. So whether the design has been submitted by one of our talented artists, or the design is a scholarship winning contest entry, they all go through the same process. This ensures that we always have the most beautiful, high quality greeting cards around.
In Part 1 of our “Making a Winning Doodle into a Dazzling Christmas Card Design” series we discussed the scanning process of the original artwork from the scholarship contest. Now we delve further into the process of creating a card.
The original artwork is given a Hi-Res scanning into our system, where a graphics program makes the image nice and crisp. This cleaning process makes the art suitable for reproduction. Once the image is set the production person, or Imager, gets to work.
The Imager has many different things to do at this point. Lauren’s artwork needed to be changed to fill space. The original piece was vertical, and the personalized Christmas cards that will feature this design will be both vertical and horizontal. The artwork is proportioned for a horizontal holiday card so that all the aspects of the original design are not lost.
This is Lauren’s artwork after it has been scanned, cleaned and revised.
The image then goes through a separation process. The Imager prepares the file, determining the different colors and finishing techniques to be used on this particular Christmas card design. There are many different options for each piece of art, including ink color choices, die-cutting, foil stamping and foil embossing.
The creative team will gather together and discuss these choices. Everyone will share their insights and give critiques and advice on how they feel the design should look. This creative input helps to make the final design a unique vision for the Gallery Collection and the Christmas card itself a thing of beauty.
The artwork that Lauren submitted to the scholarship contest is coming to fruition through the hard work and creative minds of the Imagers and everyone on the creative team. This design will become personalized holiday cards that Lauren, and everyone at the Gallery Collection, will be very proud of.
Coming up in Part 3, our final installment, we’ll share how the final decisions on colors, foils and the appearance of the card as a whole are made. You won’t want to miss this!
The process of creating our beautiful, personalized Christmas cards starts with an idea, and ends with a card that is also a work of art. But this doesn’t happen overnight. There are many steps between the start of the design process and the lovely finished product. Take design #864CX, Red Berry Greetings Holiday Card, for example. This stunning, richly embossed card began as a sketch, and turned into a masterpiece.
Here is the design concept sketch for what would eventually become one of our best sellers in 2009:
A second sketch shows the progression of the design to what was used for the actual card:
After the design was solidified, the creative team had to decide which color scheme they felt would fit the design best. There was no skimping when it came to this detail. The card was produced in a wide range of colors, in both the paper stock and the design itself. These different versions of the card were looked over meticulously until a decision was made on which holiday card design was the most eye-catching and attractive.
Some of the different colors there were to choose from included white cards with blue berries and buff cards with red berries:
The Gallery Collection offers a wide range of dark stock cards, which are always attention-getters. So, of course, we had to try out the design on our many different dark stock options. As you can see, the creative team had their work cut out for them:
With so many different options – all of them quite striking – deciding what color scheme would make the final cut was not easy. But in the end there was one combination that was so striking, so perfectly gorgeous, that it became the clear winner:
The combination of lustrous red and gold foil on the deep black matte background took everyone’s breath away. The creative team knew they had a winner. Red Berry Greetings became a proud part of our personalized holiday cards collection and one of our most popular sellers.
The Gallery Collection is constantly striving to bring you the most beautiful and high quality greeting cards available. So when the holiday season arrives and your Christmas cards start rolling in, you’ll know just how much effort went into achieving all the different designs and styles you see.
