From easel to card rack, here are SANDRINE MAUGY’s 11 fail-safe tips for successfully designing your own cards, from the composition stage to the final print
Whether you want to run a small batch of greeting cards from one of your favourite paintings or have your designs distributed by a large card company, producing a greeting card requires a good design and needs to follow a few rules to be successful.
The first step is to produce the artwork. It can be a drawing, a painting, a piece of textile art, or anything that can be photographed.
sandrinemaugy.com Instagram @sandrinemaugy ▶
1 FIT YOUR COMPOSITION INTO A STANDARD FORMAT
The way you compose your picture is crucial. The space is limited, but even more importantly, a set format is required. The cards will have to fit into standard envelopes and a printer will offer a limited range of greeting card formats. If your composition doesn’t fit one of these formats perfectly, there will be some awkward negative spaces left around your design. Generally, these standards are ‘A’ formats, such as A5 or A6. They can also be square, or an oblong shape that will fit into a DL envelope (A4 folded in three). The original artwork doesn’t have to be the right size, but it has to be the right proportions. For example, an A3 painting will reduce perfectly into an A5 card, because the proportions are the same.
2 BEWARE OF SCALE
One thing to be aware of when working on a different scale, meaning designing a card that will be printed a different size from the original, is that some parts of your subject might not translate very well between sizes. Tiny details on an A3 painting could be impressively neat when printed on an A5 card but lost when printed on an A6 card. The opposite might not work either. Details on a miniature A7 painting will look blurred or untidy on an A4 card.
3 PLACEMENT
Try to be careful about where the important parts of the design are placed. For example, you might take into consideration that your card will be displayed amongst others and the whole card may not be visible. Try to include something at the top of the card, so if the bottom part is hidden, the top will attract attention. In this example, three seagulls add interest to an otherwise empty sky.
4 BE AWARE OF THE SPACE
It doesn’t mean that the design has to cover the whole card, but that you pay attention to negative spaces even more than usual. The design will not be mounted or framed. It will stand on its own, the edge of the card being the only border. This makes shapes and spaces (positive and negative) stand out. Any awkward neg
