Design, Designs, How To's, Inspiration
The Ultimate Guide: How To Design The Perfect Christmas Card
Christmas is almost upon us, so we sat down with our Design Team to hear some of their personal tips on how to create the ultimate Christmas card, for the festive season.
Luckily, they have decided to share some of their insider knowledge, alongside some tips and tricks on creating perfectly personalised Christmas cards, for family, friends, and even colleagues. They agree five key elements make up the perfect Christmas card.
But wait! This year we are extra lucky, not only do we have the wonderful design team’s help, Helloprint has teamed up with Canva – an online design tool used to empower small to medium businesses to bring creative business or personal dreams to life.
HelloPrint x Canva makes the possibility to design products like Christmas cards easy and hassle-free.
In these simple steps you will feel like a professional designer too:
- Start with Design with Canva
- Choose your product (Christmas card)
- Select your size
- Upload a personal design or choose from one of our templates
- Let your imagination run wild designing your card
- Click Finished Designing
- Proof for print
- Finalise your Ultimate Christmas card
- Add to the basket and wait for your cards to arrive!
** you can only upload a personalised design when starting the product selection from design with Canva, if you start from the website, you will only be able to choose from our templates**
Just use the library of thousands of high-quality ready-to-go templates to bring your ideas to the screen! Don’t be a Grinch… go check it out!!
Style
Primarily when creating your Christmas card, arguably one of the most fundamental things to decide on is style…
• Deciding if you want to stick with a more traditional Christmas card or, design something a bit more unique and personal?
• Do you want to design a Christmas card that is filled with creative animations or one that uses actual photos of your family, friends, or colleagues? How about designing a card that features both?
• Should your Christmas card be more text-heavy or more centered around images?
The Design Team’s advice: “Ultimately, the most important thing to ensure when deciding on the style of your Christmas card is to let your personality shine through.”
Or go ahead and choose a professional Canva template to start designing. Everything is separated into categories so it’s super easy to find one that fits your needs.
Click here for a simple video tutorial on how to use the Canva templates: https://youtu.be/AFk7erzR5S0
Pictures
The pictures you choose to use in your Christmas card will depend on the style that you have selected.
• For example, if you’ve opted to design a Christmas card filled with animations and you are a big fan of animals, wouldn’t it be fun to create an illustration of your favourite animal wearing a Christmas hat?
•On the other hand, if you would like to design a special personalised Christmas card, then how about creating a collage of festive family pictures?
If you want a special, magic touch, you can add elements surrounding images such as snowflakes, baubles, or even sleighs.
The Design Team stated, “Whenever we start designing, we always start with the images”. These are of higher importance, as they are the first thing your eyes are drawn to. “We then use these images as a base for the texts”. Check your images in Canva and make them pop!
Text
People generally still use the basic “Merry Christmas” when designing Christmas cards. Although this is a timeless phrase that will never grow old, we find that adding a bit more of a personal touch can help make your card more memorable and appealing.
Think carefully about who will be receiving your Christmas cards and how you would best like to communicate your wishes. The Design Team “We like to find symmetry between the images and text in all designs.
For example, if we notice that a lot of the elements are on the right side of a page, we then try to put the text on the left side to make it more balanced and visually appealing.”
Colour
Using colour gives your card a real Christmas feeling, you can never go wrong with the traditional colours: Green, White, and Red.
However, you don’t limit yourself to just these colour combinations! Many other colour combinations are perfect for the Christmas season: black, gold, silver, and blue.
The Design Team states, “When choosing your colour combination, it’s best to stick between one and four colours. This ensures that your card does not come out looking like a Christmas coloured firework!” Have a play around in Canva and see which colours work best for you!
Font Style
Whichever type of card you end up creating, it is a fun idea to try to incorporate a Christmas feeling with the font. One of our most common fonts used for Christmas cards is Hand Lettering.
It is a widely used style that helps to give that personal touch to your card. We recommend using this font for short texts as it can be slightly difficult to read sometimes, depending on your audience. For longer texts, we would recommend using clear fonts, such as Serif or Avenir (to avoid any confusion!)
With Canva you can change or add text, shapes, elements, stickers, free images, add fonts and even upload your assets like family photos, or animations you’d like to include in your cards! But, at the end of the day, choose which font you feel shows your message best, in your style.