Tag Archives: Design process

The brief:

Create a set of greetings cards for sentiments or events that are worthy of a greetings card but are not currently catered for by card manufacturers.  The cards could be linked to other calendar events, obscure Saint’s days, sporting calendars or any other happening that is worth celebrating or commiserating. You may wish to explore some of life’s other landmarks that currently don’t feature in greetings cards, like getting your first grey hairs, being released from prison or any other personal landmark someone might want to share.

Design the cover of your card and the message inside. You may wish to include an envelope. Produce at least three finished cards.

Analysing the brief:

For me the key elements of the brief are:

• Currently not catered for
• Worthy of a greeting card

These were the starting points for developing my ideas.

Research and development:

My research process has been documented in my learning log, I worked through a number of phases:

• Brainstorming ideas
• Talking to friends and family for their ideas
• Researching greeting cards and the greeting card market
• Narrowing down options and developing visuals

Visualising ideas

Throughout the process I kept adding to my Pinterest boards (Swipe file, GD1 Exercises, Postcard Inspiration etc.) , I also developed sketches for a number of the possible ideas before I decided on a shortlist. I developed four cards based on different themes.

Card One: Nice Growing

Good Growing sketches

This card was prompted by the lettuces I grew in the summer; with every lettuce I picked I felt a sense of achievement. I thought this would be a nice occasion to mark for anyone who has felt similarly – it could be for other gardeners, for allotment holders or even for windowsill growers. Rather than illustrate it I decided to use a photo. I then used brushes to add some dirt and make it look like the lettuce has just been laid on the card having been pulled from the ground.

In terms of the typeface I wanted something fluid and organic looking that was in keeping with theme. I envisaged that the cards would be bought by women, gardeners and possibly parents (whose children had grown something special).

Once I had decided on the cover I thought more about the buyer and imagined they would probably be practical people, possibly with an interest in environmental sustainability and as such there needed to be something else to the card. That’s when I came up with the idea of making the card do something more and using it as a planter in its own right. Inside there are faint markings for where to fold the card to create a small, environmentally friendly seed tray.

Card Two: Ssssnake

This card started more generally as a congratulations on a new kitten/pet idea and when I did some research it seemed like there were already quite a lot of these available particularly for furry pets. What I didn’t find was anything for reptiles and as a friend have given their son a snake a while ago it made me think this might be a better direction to take.

I did some online research and looked at photos and illustrations of snakes. Early on I decided that as this was likely to be a younger recipient it should be more interesting than a plain card so I wanted to make it a pop-up. Of the set this was the card that caused the most technological challenges in terms of my skills with Illustrator in particular. I did some sketching using Adobe Draw including the colour, which I was then able to transfer as a Jpeg to my desktop. Once I transferred it to Illustrator the colours were completely off, it looked the same in Photoshop but not in Illustrator and I was completely stuck about what to do.

Because I wanted to do the whole set as vectors in illustrator and I had set up the template I decided to persevere. Using the pen tool I then recreated the snake across the front and back of the card and added colour using fill and the brush tool. It was a laborious and at times frustrating process but it has helped me learn some of the features of the programme. Using a similar approach I created the inside of the card and the popup snake which I decided to leave blank so it could be coloured in and personalised to the recipients own snake. It took a little experimenting to find the right place to put the pop-up but in the end I was happy with the effect.

Card Three: Nice Ink

In America nearly one in four people have a tattoo, in the UK it is nearly one in five. They appear to have become more popular with younger people with one in three of 18 to 44 yr olds in the US having a tattoo (YouGov 2015). As an artform tattooing has also evolved involving more subtle and ‘watercolour’ type effects. As someone who got a Tattoo in her 30s I thought this was something to celebrate and while there are some cards available these seem to be mainly aimed at the Tattoo artist rather than the Tattoo recipient.

I wanted to create something that had a contemporary feel and was probably aimed at women. I therefore thought it needed to have a front cover with a more delicate Tattoo style.

I decided to add an internal border that had a reference to more traditional Celtic style Tattooing, also recognising that people tend to have more than one Tattoo. People tend to get Tattoos that are meaningful to them so I wanted the card to celebrate and acknowledge a new Tattoo.

The initial drawings were done with Adobe draw on my iPad, which I then transferred and developed in Illustrator. This took much longer than anticipated because I had to learn how differently the brushes behaved from those in Photoshop. After some consultation with my family members I decided to go with the two scrolls rather than a single central scroll.

It got a little busier as an image than I had intended, I was thinking along the lines of the rose Tattoo I found through my research (Tattoo mood board 2), but it seemed to need the balance of the additional Lilies and leaves   It definitely felt like something that I could keep adding to forever so I had to get to a point where I felt it worked well enough and to be disciplined enough to leave it alone at that point.

Card Four: When in doubt…

Bake Sketches

I was in two minds about whether to include this card as it was the simplest of the set and uses a stock photograph rather than one of my own.  I have a number of friends who work in the food industry and there is obviously a lot of food content on social media and TV so I thought a cooking/baking card might be fun. Something lighthearted, perhaps in the vein of the ‘Keep calm…’ themes. I did some early sketches, which I was reasonably happy with but then when I was looking online I came across this image, which immediately caught my attention.

I have used it in part because it posed an interesting debate for me in terms of being a photographer and being a designer. As a photographer I was uncomfortable about using someone else’s image, but as a designer I was looking for something that communicated a message. After all the brief doesn’t say ‘using only images created by you design a greeting card.’

It seemed to me it was too good an image not to use and it conveyed the idea of baking being fun; something you might do when things are getting tough; something to do with friends or your family. I experimented with using text inside and out and feedback suggested that having text on the front worked better. It was also an interesting experience in that sometimes simple solutions work as well as complicated ones as the section on Occam’s Razor in the course materials suggests.

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