Greeting Cards

Xmasonwheels. Real Christmas Cards gone Virtual.

This video came to me this morning via Google reader, and since I work for a rather large greeting card company, I had to post something about it.

Swedish Post have come up with a great idea to promote the sending of traditional greeting cards, by replicating designs created by Jenny Nystrom as a live action video feed to the web.

Christmas Cards on Wheels (xmasonwheels.com), is the work of Åkestam Holst which allows visitors to the site to control a camera mounted on wheels. Visitors can guide the camera around a track and then take pictures of the Christmas scene which is sent as real Christmas cards to friends and family. Visitors can also choose to be the engineer of the Christmas Train and decide what should happen in the live surroundings.

As a designer that works in an internal studio that is bridging the gap between physical greeting card products and an ever expanding digital and online experience I think this is a great idea. It creates a real connection between the online experience and a physical product that helps promote the Swedish Post.

Some Nice Christmas Card Designs.

I work for a company that produces some of the best holiday greeting cards in the world, so you could say I am a little biased when it comes to us vs the competition. With that said though, I am always the first to admit there are some really amazing designers doing great work that rivals or at times exceeds what my company produces. That’s OK it helps raise the bar, and drives all of us forward to be even more creative, and design better products.

To many, designing a greeting card seems like it would be easy, but in reality it can be one tough design job. Over the last week, I had the opportunity to be back on the greeting card design boards designing two cards (something I haven’t done in years), while I thought it would be a simple task, it took allot more effort than I remembered.

Below is a gallery of Christmas cards that I think are absolutely wonderful from a design perspective. They have pushed the genre forward in terms of design, process, illustration, message and quality.

Knock Knock. Who’s There? Fill In The Blank.

A few weeks ago we had house guests in from Baltimore for a few days. And just yesterday, I received a great little thank you note from them designed by Knock Knock. I had never seen the Knock Knock products before so I had to go to the website and check out what they are all about. I have to tell you, as a designer that works for a rather large social expressions company, whose primary product is ink on paper greetings, we should have done something like this a long time ago.

Knock Knock’s entire line of products is based on the concept of “fill in the blank.” Even their tag line on their logo says it, “Multiple choice correspondence, because life is fill-in-the-blank.” I love the concepts, everything from paper “Tweet” notes for the Twitter challenged, to “Top reasons I must have sex with you.” I just spent about 45 minutes going through the web site and have a whole list of products I intend to order from them.

The thank you card that we got is well designed. It has a great color pallet, it looks like nicer stationary without being to over the top, the editorial is fun and light. The entire piece has a semi-retro feel without relying to heavily on retro shtick. This is really fun stuff.

Terada Architects, Greeting Cards.

Since my day job is working for a large social expressions company that produces things made out of paper with a fold in the middle, I’m always impressed when I find a series of greeting cards that are unlike anything I’ve seen before. These aren’t totally new, but they are very clever and fun. Architectural model greeting cards from Kaminokousakujo, use paper figures often used in architectural modeling. They are the creative brainchild of Naoki Terada (Terada Architects).