As you may have heard, Greeting Cards are now available in your Artist Shop! While we’ve all received cards in varying degrees of banality and awesomeness, how can YOU make amazing Greeting Cards that will delight your customers and fans and prompt them to purchase? While you have your art game on lock, we’re here to give you some general ideas that may prompt moments of design clarity as you populate your Shop with new or tweaked designs perfect for Greeting Cards.
First, the basics
We all know what Greeting Cards are, but let us tell you about ours:
- 5 x 7-inches, folded in the center
- Vertically oriented, but the design can be placed to be viewed horizontally also
- Printed on the front, blank on the inside and back
- Heavyweight Mohawk Bright White card stock
- Sold in packs of 3, 5, and 10
- Come with white envelopes
You can read the product setup guide here, or if you already have a design that fits well you can simply activate cards in your shop here.
Design with purpose
On the one hand, a card is simply a folded piece of paper with some sort of word or design on the front that someone half reads at a celebratory party or during the holidays. But these cards are far different from the lame ones you might see at your nearest corner store.
Use your years of creative expertise to make your own Greeting Cards awesome. Make them truly unique. After all, your fans love your stuff, so why wouldn’t they love it on a card, too?
You might be wondering, “how do I make a card perfectly mine?”
Let’s take a step back. We suppose you could just go into your Shop Dashboard and click to add all of your designs to this awesome new product. But instead, consider which designs would truly work for a card and think about:
- What are your customers looking for?
- What would you personally want to see on a card?
- Look to compelling designs that can be front and center, or repeating patterns that elevate the senses.
- Or if you work with words, what word, words, or phrase would be absolutely perfect, hilarious, and/or poignant on a card?
- Or is it a simple “thank you” card, but, you know, with swear words on it?
To bleed or not to bleed?
In your Artist Shop dashboard, you have the option to go full-bleed on your card design. That means it goes past all of the edges (or some of them) and utilizes those edges in interesting ways. Do you have a character popping up or down from the bottom or top? Do you have a pattern that is just so badass, it needs to go to all of the edges? You have that option!
Conversely, you can just keep your design centered horizontally and vertically, which is particularly useful if you’ve already done something similar on a t-shirt or other apparel items in your shop. The design can be essentially 1:1 with those. Then, if you’ve chosen a transparent PNG, consider the color of the background of the card, whether something complimentary, analogous, or something else entirely.
‘Tis the season of milestones and other such important days
Holidays and other celebratory milestones go along with cards like chocolate and peanut butter. Consider designs that celebrate the usual stuff like birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, and the like, but through your artistic lens. Is it creepy and outlandish for Halloween? Do you make it hardcore tongue-in-cheek? Or do you go full on mushy? We need not remake generic cards you can get anywhere, but look to those usual suspects for an inspiration baseline.
Support the postal service
We’d be remiss not to mention the plight of the US Postal Service and how its current state not only impacts the rights of citizens in the States, but how it’s huge challenges also impacts those around the world.
Sending a heartfelt, funny, or just plain awesome card with a handwritten note inside not only shows a unique and heartfelt connection point between two people, but buying stamps directly supports the Postal Service, and will ensure they’re around for as long as possible – especially into election season.
Design Challenge ACCEPTED!
Have a design that screams GREETING CARD? Consider submitting something to our Greeting Cards Design Challenge happening now! Our community will then help determine which design rises to the top and gets printed. If your design is picked, you get some funds and earn on every sale of your card design!
Whichever design direction you choose, we think your customers are going to love your new Greeting Cards. Add them to your shop today, then promote on social and the like. If you’re looking for inspiration, have a look here at what other artists in the Threadless community are designing. Be sure to tag @threadless on social so we can see your awesome new Greeting Card designs!
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