Tuesday 27 October 2009

Oh dear, jumping on the horribly early christmas stuff bandwagon...

Well, the first christmas lights have gone up along Brighton North Street, I almost bought a Galaxy 'Mistletoe kisses' bar today (But then realised it was a rip off), and there are horrible Christmas cards popping up left right and centre.

In the past I've always bought my Christmas cards from Paperchase. They usually do fairly nice designs at fairly acceptable prices. But given that my business is design, I figure all my visual communications say something about me... including the mundane Christmas card.
Last year, I designed my own for the first time. They were... ok. They did the job, although I really wasn't that pleased with them. I was pleased with myself for taking the initiative, but that was it. Take a look at them here.
This year, better! Hopefully, anyway. I'm snowed under with uni work (haha, snowed, christmas jokes, oh dear.) so no time to do a whole big new concept... so I decided to re-hash last year's Christmas holiday project, which you can view here. I was (and am) really pleased with this, so I decided to take those images and make them slightly more christmas card friendly. I'm going to be sending these cards to both my family and people I want to impress, so they need to be both accessible and impressive. I like to think they strike a balance between the two (i.e. neither accessible or impressive? Oh dear...)

Another point which I've had to consider is the environmental cost. I strongly believe that there's no substitute for a real, physical christmas card that you recieve in the post. Those 'e-cards' are a load of rubbish. You click a link and get a tacky flash animation with some nasty typeface over it. Maybe you can get classy e-cards, I don't know, but even if you can, it's still not the same as a real card. But, we do have to question paper useage here. I hate the wasteage which comes with christmas, all that wrapping paper, all that packaging, all those envelopes that just get chucked away with barely a glance. So, in a small step to try and reduce this, these are going to be postcards, which will be posted sans envelope. Saving the world! Kinda.

Here they are.


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