Designing and printing greeting cards to give to loved ones, sell through your business, or send to clients has never been easier. With the personal touch and uniqueness of both businesses and individuals being highly celebrated, we’ve put together a list of five tips to help effortlessly guide you through the design and printing process.
5 Tips for Designing and Printing Greeting Cards
Whatever your reasons are for wanting custom printed greeting cards, the finished product is required to be of a high professional quality and available in the required quantity. To help achieve this, here are five key tips we recommend following:
- Plan ahead – arrange to have the design for your greeting card completed early on, especially if it is an original artwork that requires professional digitalisation (we’ll cover this in more detail below). If the design was digitally created, once it is emailed to us for printing, we aim for a quick turnaround. But it is still best to order in advance of when you require them due to unexpected delays.
- Vertical or horizontal? – the layout you select is best chosen based upon the function of the card and the recipients. If you are selling greeting cards, a vertical layout is best suited to displaying in a store and the front cover design is seen as more visually balanced. A horizontal card could suit best if you are wanting to make your card stand out, it is predominately for sending out to clients or for giving out at fundraisers and other events.
- Consider your target audience – when designing the front and inside of your greeting card, remember to keep in mind who your target audience is. Having a mock-up design is a good idea to allow you to discover if your design is viable to sell, or to check if it portrays your business’ message accurately.
- Ensure your files are print-ready – after finalising your design, you will need to provide us with a print-ready file. This is a high-resolution PDF document with a 2mm bleed on all edges, has the fonts outlined and all colours are identified as CMYK. Further information can be found in our guide What is a Print-Ready File, or feel free to contact us if you'd like us to prepare a design for you.
- Quantity to order – it is always better to have a few more greeting cards than to not have enough. Whether there is accidental damage by customers in store or you make a mistake when writing someone’s name, it’s nice to have some spares available. It also works out cheaper per unit to order in bulk.
Digitising your Artwork
If your artwork is not in a digital format, you have two options. Artists wanting to sell their artwork on a card tend to choose to use our art reproduction service, where we take a high-resolution scan of the artwork, followed by some colour correcting and tweaking to match the physical artwork. Or you could take a high-resolution photo square on of your artwork and email it to us, when we will crop it ready for printing onto your cards.
Ready Made Greeting Cards
If you are after a greeting card for a special occasion, our retail arm, Be My Guest Design, offers plenty of ready-made greeting cards.