Christmas is almost here and we know that designers have tight deadlines for Christmas projects. We put together a list of awesome FREE Christmas fonts for commercial use that you can use in your designs for personal or commercial projects like holiday greeting cards, envelopes, postcards and any other fun Holiday projects you are working on. If you use any of the fonts listed, feel free to share a link to the artwork you did in the comments below!
Every year around this time we get swamped with orders for Customized Holiday Greeting Cards. Just goes to show that print is a big part of tradition and definitely not dying, its evolving.
More and more, we see modern print technologies being used to personalize the cards and give them a little extra zest:
Qr Codes directing people to website landing pages or videos
Variable Data Printing (VDP) being used to personalize every detail of the card including the cover image
The holidays present a perfect opportunity to grow your relationships with customers. Kind gestures make an impression that stays with people.
And we practice what we preach! Every December we print and mail our own custom Holiday Greeting Cards and custom mousepads. It’s simply a way to show our customers we appreciate their continued business and trust in our company.
We also really enjoy receiving Holiday cards sent to us by our customers and vendors… makes us feel special 🙂
This is one of the main reasons we are a successful printing company (40 years in business). We stood strong and endured the recent economic hardships because we value and build relationships with our customers.
Custom Holiday Greeting Cards Build Relationships
What Greeting Cards Say About You
Yes, you may be judged so choose wisely! Of course sending out holiday greeting cards is a wonderful gesture, but the card you choose to send can and will be critiqued.
Some companies take the easy route and buy the pre-made boxed greeting card sets that everyone else buys and guess what… there’s a big possibility that someone else sent that same exact card to your customer and how does that make you look?
I’ve also witnessed the so-called holiday cards that were really nothing but advertisements. You know, the ones with the big logo taking up the whole front of the card and a very generic “Happy Holidays”, here’s a coupon to buy stuff from us cards. That’s not personal, that doesn’t build relationships, it simply becomes a sales pitch.
If you genuinely want to thank your customers or vendors and wish them happy holidays, it should come naturally to go the extra mile to do so.
I’m not saying you have to spend a fortune (which some companies do!) but customizing your holiday greeting cards with a nice message and possibly a real signature inside will make a big difference for your efforts.
It is the season for Holiday Cards and there is nothing more thoughtful than designing your own Custom Holiday Cards with your own message and graphics. Small business and corporations can benefit from sending a personalized corporate holiday greeting card to their customers and showing their gratitude for their business.
In this tutorial we will discuss how to create a print-ready design for our custom 5 x 7 folding holiday greeting cards using Adobe Illustrator.
Adobe Illustrator is a great vector graphics program to use for print design because it creates crisp, sharp lines for both shapes and text. It also makes it extremely easy to add bleeds and crops.
Quick note:
Vector graphics is the use of geometrical primitives such as points, lines, curves, and shapes or polygon(s), which are all based on mathematical equations, to represent images in computer graphics. – Wikipedia
Step One: Creating the document forHoliday cards
Open up Illustrator, click on File>New.
The New Document dialogue pops up:
Edited (thank you Ras!)
Since holiday cards are printed on flat sheets of paper, we will design using 10 x 7 as our dimensions (folded size is 5 x 7)
important:
We will also have graphics that bleed off the edge of the paper, for this we have to add 1/8th” (0.125″) bleed space all around to make sure the ink reaches the edge of our holiday cards for trimming.
– Offset and digital printing presses use the CMYK color model to produce a wide array of colors in the final print. An offset press typically has 4 ink wells which are filled with Cyan (C), Magenta (M), Yellow (Y), and Black (K) ink and a digital press would have the same except using toner instead of ink.
– Your full color design will be divided into these 4 different colors at pre-press, this is called Color Separation and is done by the pre-press department using software called a RIP (Raster Image Processor). This creates plates for an offset press or a set of instructions for a digital press.
– Images and artwork documents should always be in 300dpi as a rule for best results.
Step Two: Using the Ruler to setup Guides
Click View>Show Rulers.
As a rule of thumb, always keep any text or images that do not reach the edge at least 1/8th inch (0.125″) away from the edge to avoid it getting cut off. Most templates that you can download have these guides marked as a “Safety Lines”.
Drag your guides from the top and left ruler and place them 1/8th” (0.125″) parallel to the black artboard line on the inside.
The outcome is a blue lined box inside of the black lined artboard where we will keep all text and graphics that do not bleed. This keeps all of the text and graphics from possibly getting cut off while being cut to the 5 x 7 size.
Step Three: Begin Your Design
It is important to keep in mind the orientation of the card as it is folded.
This applies only to holiday greeting cards that fold horizontally. When designing the outside of the holiday card, you must account for the back outside panel to be upside down in your artwork.
Once all of these steps are in completed, you can rest assured that your Holiday greeting cards are print-ready.
