Create - Collaborative Post
Last year I ventured into card designing for a big brand and I must say, I'm loving it! You don't have to be a designer though or even an artist to create beautiful and even professional looking cards from home, so if you want to save money on shop bought cards and create special bespoke designs, here's some ideas to help.
Plan your cards first
Whether it's in draft form on screen or even with good old pen and paper, its always a good idea to plan out your card layout first. Decide what your main focus will be, what images you'll need, what space you'll need for text and how it will be formatted. I always start by putting my text in first, then working out a rough shape for the picture area and deciding if I need anything in the gaps, a washed out background layer or colourful background. Very often I find that my best selling cards are on crisp white card with an image and text in colour, as opposed to a fully coloured card, I have no idea why! If you need a few ideas, have a look on Pinterest to get an idea of what styles you like and what layouts work well for your theme.
Decide on fonts & images
When choosing the right fonts, images and elements, I find sites like Design bundles hugely helpful, with simple things like downloadable vector images like the brilliant teacher svg which can be used again and again for things like teacher cards and kids cards. These sites also have fonts to download, so if your programme doesn't come with anything suitable, it's worth a browse to invest in something just right. Whether you're using a design website or an Adobe type programme, it's a good idea to keep all your elements as separate as you can so you can move them about freely to get your design just right. You may also want to create a small logo or add some text to the back of the card to make them look more professional. If you're just making for fun, then you can leave blank or right a cheeky extra message on the back instead.
Planning to sell
If you're planning to sell your card designs, it's important to make sure any fonts or images you have are usable for commercial ventures, confirming you have the rights to sell your designs including those elements such as something like the pencil svg instead of downloads for personal use only. Other than that, you can have fun packing up your cards with envelopes in cello bags and selling any way you please!
Choose the right card
You can have your cards printed elsewhere, but if you're printing from home, there's just a couple of things to consider before you get started. Firstly, standard card used for greetings cards needs to be around 300gsm in weight, or it will just be too 'floppy' to stand up properly when it's received. As well as the card type, think about what your printer can do, if you can print to the edge or if you will have a border. If your printer doesn't print to the edge, you may just need to adjust your design slightly to incorporate the frame, so it goes all the way around the front image instead of being off to one side.
Card designing is so much fun, and once you have a good collection of elements and design ideas, you can use these in all kinds of art and craft projects too!
https://designbundles.net/collections/pencil-svg
