Greeting Card Design
I created a nice funky little greeting card design last week for a company called Active Dental that provides marketing services to dental surgeries, and high end dental products to surgeries and the general public.
Now the idea behind this greeting card (birthday card) is to provide something for Active Dental to offer to the dental surgeries that they can in turn use to maintain a good relationship with their customer base whilst at the same time provide advertising for Active Dental. So it’s a win win situation for both parties involved.
The card front design is shown below in two colourways, and inside the card is a small advert for ‘Active Smile’ – which a product offered by Active Dental.
This advert (and Active Smile web address) on the greeting card serves as a constant reminder to the surgery itself of an Active Dental product that they can purchase and use on their clients, but also promotes this product to their customer base who may visit the Active Dental website and even request this product from their dentist at their future appointments.
The inside with promotional area:
It also looks nice in green, full spread shown below.
Using The Brand ImagaryWithin The Design
Although this birthday card design aims to be perceived as less of direct mailing and more of a genuine greeting card, if you look closely you can see how I’ve placed Active Smile branding within the colourful design.
The Active ‘umbrella brand icon’ can be seen on the toothbrush handle, on the toothpaste tube, and one of the friendly birthday messages says ‘bright smiles’, which is an Active Smile slogan, but also can be perceived as another happy birthday greeting just like ‘many happy returns’ right next to it.
It’s important that the card is perceived as being genuine (and is seen as attractive and thus worth putting on the mantle) so as to further the relationship between the dental surgery and their customer, and so that it stands half a chance of not going straight into the bin with all the other ‘direct mailings’.
11 Responses to “Greeting Card Design”
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What programmes did you use to create your designs?
Regards
Craig
I used Adobe Illustrator for these – have you used this software?
Amanda
I’m trying my best. I have done some work with Illustrator but still at the early stages. I’ve just started a night school course to help build my portfolio for when i apply for a Graphic Design course starting in August. I was wondering if i could maybe send you some of the work ive done, get your feedback? I really like that card design, and i can see now i really need to look into Illustrator more. I’ve been asked to design a newsletter for a University and was intending using InDesign, never used it though so i have a couple of weeks to learn that aswell, lol. Would that be the best program to use for that?
Any help would be much appreciated. Can send me a direct email if that would be easier.
Regards
Craig
By all means yes Craig, I’m happy for you to send me your designs for feedback, just email them using the contact email address on the main website; http://www.trulyace.com/contact.html
Indesign is a good programme for layout design and work that you may have created in Illustrator can easily be imported into it also so it’s handy to use if you are using Illustrator because obviously files can easily swap between the two programmes.
Indesign has become and more and more popular of recent years, but I believe that Quark is still a fairly popular programme also.
At one time nearly all designers would use Quark, but as I said, Indesign has grabbed some significant market share over recent years, so it must be a good programme.
Indesign is good for multipage layouts to save time and be more efficient but if you are working on just one or two page layouts (double sided print layout designs for instance, like a double sided flyer or business card as an example, or even a one page newsletter), Illustrator also does the job just as well rather than investing in the high cost of Indesign on top of the high cost of Illustrator.
I use illustrator for print layouts all the time, and would only want Indesign simply for large multi-page layouts where are cumbersome to work with in Illustrator.
Needless high costs are obviously something to be avoided at startup stage, and indeed freelancers should always watch their spending at any point if they want to turn a good profit. ie not buying software just for the sake of it, only if you think your existing software isn’t sufficient for needs or is making you less efficient.
I look forward to hearing from you with your work samples.
Amanda
I think I like it in pink the best, but the yellow looks good too. Also I like how the logo isn’t overpowering the rest of the card, and that it looks more like a greeting card than a marketing tool.
I like the pink the best also, but that’s just me and my love of pink girly things!
It looks nice in blue also actually, and the final colours we went for were a pale blue background version and a plain white background version – they will print samples, show them to the surgeries and see which colour scheme they prefer.
We did get a bit more commercial in the end and one amend was that ‘Many Happy Returns’ was changed to ‘From Your Dentist’, but it doesn’t spoil the overall look and actually probably a change for the best in terms of marketing.
Nice blog. This is my second visit and was truly worth it. I have bookmarked your site for future reference!
Hi – can anyone help me with finding software for creating greeting cards and personalising these??? can anyone advise what software is the best, pricewise and do i need to go on a course to use this???
Many thanks. Shellina
The best software for designing anything creative that is going to be able to offer you proper print quality is Adobe Illustrator. It’s expensive, but there’s good reason for that.
If this is related to business activity, I wouldn’t try to skimp on price and buy inferior software, just buy the best, which is essentially Adobe Illustrator.
This is pretty complex and powerful software, but its entirely down the individual as to whether you think you can learn how to use it off your own back of if you need to take a course.
For instance I am a self taught designer and illustrator and essentially sat down with the software and figured out how to draw with it and how to lay out those drawings properly for a print project. Just by trial and error and perhaps Googling every now and then when I got stuck on something.
Lots and lots of designers teach themselves how to use the software and you can do also. Alternatively if you don’t feel you can learn well that way, because we all learn in different ways, I’m sure you can easily find a course out there that teaches you how to use Adobe Illustrator.
I did a quick search and found this, which might be worth investigating;
http://www.adobe.com/support/training/products/illustrator.html
If you are perhaps not needing to create your own designs from scratch to print, and just want to customise someone else’s design you can find several online services for that, such as http://www.zazzle.co.uk for instance.
I know this if off topic but I’m looking into starting my own blog and was curious what all is required to get setup? I’m assuming having a blog like yours would cost a pretty penny? I’m not very internet savvy so I’m not 100% sure. Any recommendations or advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
I highly recommend The Blog Mistress (http://www.blogmistress.com/), and actually blogs are very reasonably priced I feel compared to other types of website.