Wanted New Cards: For Classmate
Note, if your designs are gender specific, be sure to fortify your meta-data accordingly.
We’d like you to create at least one card for these categories using the Stock Cards function (Bigstock) or your own graphic designs. Remember, when you’re submitting your new stock card, add a little note about the intended category in your Notes to Reviewers.
Be inventive, be clever, be creative. Go for it!
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Freebie Wednesday: Butter Scotch
Butter Scotch is a collection of handmade fonts designed to perfectly combine informal, presumptuous, romantic texts, cute bouncy scripts, natural brush fonts, and hand-drawn design elements. Font comes in OTF and TTF formats.
This stylish freebie is brought to you by I Do Not Sleep! Only available for at the Hungry Jpeg for a week!
This product comes with a commercial license.
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Rainbow Connection: Year of the Tiger
2022 is the Year of the Tiger and here are some color palettes to celebrate that.
Red or vermilion, corresponding with fire, symbolizes good fortune and joy. Red is found everywhere during Chinese New Year and other holiday celebrations and family gatherings. In addition to the new year, red has been used in Chinese weddings since ancient times, which can represent the traditional Chinese wedding color.
Yellow of a golden hue, corresponding with earth, is considered the most beautiful and prestigious color. The Chinese saying Yellow generates Yin and Yang implies that yellow is the center of everything. Associated with but ranked above brown, yellow signifies neutrality and good luck. Yellow is sometimes paired with red in place of gold.
I hope this will give you some inspiration towards your card designs.
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Nuts and Bolts: Curved Text
Nuts & Bolts – Curved Text
As part of an overall design, greeting cards present an additional challenge / opportunity with text. The placement, color, size, font choice and more are just as important as the primary design and should not be an after-thought.
It should work and flow with the design giving a clear intention as to why this style was chosen. It should be done sparingly and with professional execution. We stress that this type of effect on text for professional greeting cards requires a learning curve that artists need to explore on their own.
We’d like to share some important considerations on a very difficult typography technique: Curved Text.
1. When in line with the design, curved text is allowable whereas warped text rarely is.
2. Slanted text simply never works – period.
3. Script fonts may only work out when they are not slanted.
4. Kerning adjustments are almost always required for minor adjustments, as is tilting the text a wee bit one direction or another after the Arc feature is applied.
5. See the Typography – Placement Submission Guideline with examples specifically:
Curved / Tilted / Slanted Text: It is very rare for curved, slanted, wavy or tilted text to work within a greeting card design. When it does, it does so because it’s following the lines and theme of the design. Still, this is a common mistake for the inexperienced greeting card designer to tilt the text in some way with no real connection to the image and no balance in the overall design.
6. Some prior advice from Corrie re: Front of Card Text specifically:
Do not warp, twist, bend, wave or otherwise mess around with your text. If you want to curve your text like I showed you in my second example card (the baby shower invitation), then you need to learn Adobe Illustrator. Text effects may look okay on a website banner, but you will not attract shoppers when you put that scrunched, higgledy-piggledy, warped and waved text on a greeting card. It doesn’t look professional. Don’t do it.
UPDATE to above: If you wish to create curves, twists, arcs, and bends to your text, then tools like Adobe Illustrator and/or Photoshop are necessary for your design arsenal – as are finding wonderful teaching videos online showing you how to use these tools to create professional quality curves on your card front text.
Now some examples:
BEFORE
The curved text is not meeting the marketability standards for professionalism as it does not follow the curve of the circle with enough precision. We would love to see this card back if you can edit the curved text. additional notes: the horizontal line alignment is not exact in this case but works with the design and the off center tail position. If the tail were perfectly centered then the text would need to also be perfectly aligned on each side.
AFTER
Additional considerations of what is NOT allowable:
1. Using italic, forward leaning fonts, can look skewed and unprofessional especially when curved using the Warp Text ‘Arc’ feature in some software programs that causes greater distortion. This was created using the Warp tool Arc feature in Photoshop.
2. Curved text that does not precisely start and end on the same horizontal alignment, unless the rotation is purposefully different to work within the design.(This curve was created using the path tool in Photoshop)
3. Odd spacing between letters can occur when you curve text in certain fonts, so the kerning will need further adjustment. Notice the ‘Birt’ spacing as compared with the balance of the letters.(This curve was created using the path tool in Photoshop)
Here are three wonderful examples of circular, curved, and wavy text that have been done with care, purpose, and all WORK:
The difference is made in the details!
Mindy
GCU Community Manager
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Wanted New Cards: 1st Chanukah/Hanukkah
Wanted Cards – 1st Chanukah / Hanukkah
The festival of lights comes early this year, beginning Sunday, November 28th.
The following Chanukah / Hanukkah categories could use some additional cards:
Holidays >> Chanukah / Hanukkah >> 1st / First Chanukah / Hanukkah
See tips regarding proper usage of superscript and ordinal numbers.
We’d like you to create at least one card for these categories using the Stock Cards function (Bigstock) or your own graphic designs. Remember, when you’re submitting your new stock card, add a little note about the intended category in your Notes to Reviewers.
Be inventive, be clever, be creative. Go for it!
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Freebie Wednesday: Cute Christmas Watercolor Baby Animals
This product comes with a commercial license.
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Rainbow Connection: Mood Indigo II
Indigo is a deep color close to the color wheel blue, as well as to some variants of ultramarine, based on the ancient dye of the same name. The word “indigo” comes from the Latin for Indian as the dye was originally exported to Europe from India. Indigo stays a hot favorite, also for 2022.
What Color is Indigo? KnockOffDecor gives you the ultimate Guide here
Skirt panels drying under the awning of a house in the Bouyi village of Shitou Zhai, China.
Indigo: The Color That Changed the World.
I hope this will give you some inspiration towards your card designs.
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Dash of Inspiration: NOVEMBER 2021 Design Challenge
Last challenge of the year! Wow! How the time does fly by. Let’s make this last one cheerful and fun.
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Theme: Holiday Humor
Requirements:
-
Create a brand new design for the upcoming season that has a humorous tone. Choose any holiday season category well suited to your design.
-
Write your own verse/message, be creative and write a message that clearly speaks to your imagery, occasion and recipient.
- Blank verse will not be considered for entry in this challenge.
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Entry Deadline: Tuesday, November 30th
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How to Enter: Post the PID (card number) and the URL (public storefront link – please WAIT for the card to be available in the public marketplace, please DO NOT post a link to your Manage Cards area) as a post in the challenge blog. We’ll forward your entry to the jury.
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Category: Any holiday season category.
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Rules:
- Submission must meet GCU’s Submission Guidelines and be Approved through the usual Review Cycle– Fast Track your submission with this in the Notes to Reviewer: NOVEMBER Design Challenge Submission here is the link to the blog post: (include THIS blog post URL)
- Only ONE card per artist per challenge.
- Submissions must be NEW, no existing designs.
- Your entry must meet the Challenge Requirements and Theme or it will not be included in the challenge.
- Stock Card Creations entries will not be accepted.
- Your designs should differ from those already offered in the category of your choice to offer shoppers a variety of choices, not more of the same.
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BLIND Judging: We hope each of you enters every month. Entries are submitted anonymously for judging by the GCU Challenge Jury which means that before and during the challenge, judges do not have any way of knowing what artist is behind each entry. This eliminates any and all concerns with ‘favoritism’. Results will post on the Community Blog. The jury will judge the entries on the following criteria:
- How well the card meets the Challenge Requirements and Theme.
- How well the card speaks to the Category the artist chooses for the card submission.
- Creativity, Execution and Marketability.
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Winners: 1st Place:
- The winning designer’s card and store will be featured on the GCU Public Blog – the blog which customers view and follow.
- As well as featured on the GCU Public Facebook Page – nearly 58,000 followers, now THAT’S exposure!
- The winning card will be Design of the Day following the announcement of the winners (within 48-hours).
EXCEPTION: Horizontal (landscape) cards may not be featured as DOD due to GCU Home Page space restrictions. In these cases, GCU will choose a different vertically oriented card from your store to feature as DOD. Thank you for your understanding and apologies for this limitation.
- The winning card will be added to the Greeting Card Universe Design Challenge Winners Pinterest Board – currently GCU’s Pinterest Page followers: 5.36K!
- The winning card, should the artist choose, may be referenced in a new series by the winning artist and he/she may Fast Track all cards in the new series (being sure to give the Challenge URL and winning card PID in your Notes to Reviewer for each card in this series).
- Winning card will be included in a marketing email to over 100,000 customers!
- GCU will create a Meet the Team board for the winning artist under the Pinterest GCU account where the winning artist will be able to pin and promote her own storefront and all that makes them a unique card designer and one of GCU’s artistic community team member.
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Winning card will be posted on GCU’s Instagram with 2,000 followers and counting!
- GCU will create a Meet the Team board for the winning artist under the Pinterest GCU account where the winning artist will be able to pin and promote her own storefront and all that makes them a unique card designer and one of GCU’s artistic community team member.
- 10 free greeting card credits added to your GCU account. Apply them at checkout and they never expire.
- A Design Challenge GCU digital award for 2021!
2nd Place:
- Your submission will be Design of the Day the following week of announcing the Challenge winners (within 7-days).
EXCEPTION: Horizontal (landscape) cards may not be featured as DOD due to GCU Home Page space restrictions. In these cases, GCU will choose a different vertically oriented card from your store to feature as DOD. Thank you for your understanding and apologies for this limitation.
- Your card will be added to the Greeting Card Universe Design Challenge Winners Pinterest Board.
- Winning card will be included in a marketing email to over 100,000 customers!
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Winning card will be posted on GCU’s Instagram with 2,000 followers and counting!
- 5 free greeting card credits added to your GCU account. Apply them at checkout and they never expire.
- A Design Challenge GCU digital award for 2021!
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Tips:
- TIP: GCU does not have a Western Christmas category, so be sure to create strong meta-tag data to represent the western flair of your new design.
- Nuts and Bolts: How to Write Product Descriptions
- Keep in mind that Western Christmas cards have deeper reds, more sage toned greens, here is some color palette inspiration.
……………………………………………………………………………………….Be inspired to create and learn something new!
Doreen Erhardt©
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Nuts and Bolts: Image Download
The difference is made in the details!
Mindy
GCU Community Manager
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Wanted New Cards: Loss of Triplet Sibling
Wanted Cards – Loss of Triplet Sibling
The following new categories are in need of cards:
Occasions >> Sympathy >> Loss of Triplet / Sibling
>> General
>> Other
>> Brother
>> Sister
Occasions >> Anniversary – Death / Remembrance >> Loss of Triplet / Sibling
>> General
>> Other
>> Brother
>> Sister
>> Year Specific
We’d like you to create at least one card for these categories using the Stock Cards function (Bigstock) or your own graphic designs. Remember, when you’re submitting your new stock card, add a little note about the intended category in your Notes to Reviewers.
Be inventive, be clever, be creative. Go for it!
GCU Community 