This stage was a little trickier than I anticipated, I knew I had software that would allow me to produce greeting cards for print but I didn’t really know how best to use it. I ended up opting for Indesign as I had a little understanding of how it worked and thought the format might be a bit more logical. I looked around online for some advice on greeting card design and found a few helpful sites.
I then set about designing the templates for the card and placing the illustrator files into the boxes created. After a little bit of adjusting I had a card ready for print here’s how it looked:
I then set about trying to print off the card. This was the bit that got confusing for me. I initially tried printing onto A4 thinking I’d cut the paper down later, but found it confusing to get the inside part of the card in the right place. After a few wrong attempts I decided to cut the paper down so that it was A5 size prior to printing, and to set my printer to print from that size. This was much easier! I tried it in black and white just to see how it worked, here’s how it turned out:
You’ll notice the images now have borders – this wasn’t an initial part of my design in Illustrator but my printer doesn’t do border-less printing so I created some small borders in Indesign to allow for this.
A couple of things need adjusting on the second card design, in the photo below you’ll see the banner on the inside of the card was slightly cropped in printing, so I moved the image so the banner wasn’t being cropped:
I printed the finished cards onto thin cream coloured card as this seemed to suit the colours of the designs and bring a unifying factor to all the cards. I think it looks a little warmer, maybe even a bit more professional on the cream coloured card instead of white. It would’ve been nice to try on different cards, but this was what we had/could afford.
The envelopes for the cards are simple white paper based, suitable for A5 cards. Again this is due to them being the envelopes we had, if I have time/money I’ll look for some cream envelopes to go with the cards, to help complete the look. I chose not to devote any real thought/time to designs on the envelope as I felt this would detract from me getting the main thing sorted (i.e. the 3 card designs). If I’d felt more confident/practiced using Illustrator and Indesign (and therefore able to produce the card designs faster) I would’ve given myself some time to consider more interesting envelope designs.
Overall I’m fairly pleased with how the cards turned out.