20 Days of Christmas: Southtown Creative.

by - Monday, December 12, 2011

Welcome to our 20 Days of Christmas! I'm so excited to bring you guys this guest post from Jessica of Southtown Creative. Check it out:)




Hi y'all! My name is Jessica and I blog and design over at Southtown Creative and I'm so excited to be guest posting here today! I recently shut down my personal blog and decided just to focus on designing and business and blogging about that, I feel like it's a little more "my style" but if you get over to Southtown and realize that it's not got a ton of posts, head over to Freckles & Dirt (the old personal blog) and you'll see posts from June-a few days ago.



Anywho...since this a Holiday guest post and I'm a designer, I thought I'd go with a "designing through the Holidays" topic.

I've been a graphic designer for about 6 years now, since the first design class I had in college and it makes the holidays awesome and challenging all at the same time! I started my design career by designing invitations, announcements and stationery for my clients so it's only natural that I have always designed my own cards, invitations, etc. When the holidays roll around it's time for me to start thinking about what I want my Christmas card to look like and how I'm going to print it, etc. I love Snapfish and some other printing services but they don't offer BLANK 4x8 cards like I like to create so I always struggle with going the expensive route and ordering from a high-end print shop or going cheap. This year, I went cheap. I created my card to be a 4x6 so I could just print it off at Walmart, I wanted simple so that worked well with it and I'm loving my cards this year (there's a little sneak peak below!).



I run into tons of people who want to create their own cards but just don't have the software, skills or the money to pay someone (like me) to design their cards for them so I thought I'd give a few tips to make those generic photo lab card templates look the best they can!
  • Make sure to pick a card that fits your personality. If you love bright colors, use bright colors, if you love Christmassy colors, check out templates with those.
  • Don't clutter the template with too many photos. Ick.
  • Make sure your photos are of high quality. Those cell phone pics may look awesome on your phone but, unfortunately, they're just not the same resolution as those that come out of an actual camera.
  • If you don't want photos on your card, don't clutter the template with too many words. There's nothing worse than a Christmas card that has a million different poems, stories or "holiday-isms" on them.
  • When selecting a font from those automated templates, make sure to match the colors and fonts to the cards fonts. For instance, if you have a pink and green card and you choose yellow font, it's going to look like you didn't know what you were doing, lol. Also, if the rest of the card has curly-que fancy font, you should stick with a common sans-serif (without the lines under the letters) font for your text (from the such-and-such family), if the card has sans-serif plain font, feel free to use a curly font but just make sure it's still readable.
You can also print cards at home if you want. These same rules apply when you're working with a program like Microsoft Publisher or whatever you have, don't make it tacky.
If you have any questions or any design needs (blog/web design, marketing, print design or branding), hit me up at jessica{at}southtowncreative{dot}com.
Thanks for having me!




P.S.
You only have one more day to enter our Freena Hair Bow Set Giveaway, don't miss out!
And while your at it, enter our $25 Shop Credit to Underground Vintage!
Oh, and still need to buy some awesome stocking stuffers? Stop on over to our Scentsy Party:)

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