Ahh the wonderful world of Birthday cards! This month I experienced my first venture in to freelance card designing. Whilst I have licensed my art work to card companies in the past, this was for existing art work and only required me sending over a file! For this job I had to make 13 birthday card designs from scratch (This was later cut down to 6 but more on that in a bit). As I was new to the card company I was working for, they wanted to see what I could come up with, so I wasn’t given a particular brief. I took to Pinterest and made a mood board of a bunch of card ideas and started scribbling down a bunch of really rough ideas.
My finished card Ideas
To be honest, I probably put in too much effort with these! I was trying to stay away from all the birthday cliches and design a card I would want to buy, making a collection which matched but where each card was unique. I love the ideas here and I want to bring some more of these to life, but unfortunately only one design got chosen by the company! Oh well, maybe I should have gone the more obvious birthday route… at the end of the day that is what sells!
Anyway, this was the chosen design, but I needed to rework it to fit a square format. Then I added some colour in photoshop and sent the design off to be approved.
The colour pallet for the collection
This one was approved first try, so I got to making it. For this design, I made all my elements separately. This way I had more control in photoshop to tweak the placement of every thing, meaning if the client wanted me to make any changes, It would be much easier as I had all my shapes on different layers!
The scan of the artwork
There’s often quite a bit of work which goes in to just making the scan look like the real piece of art! There’s a lot of colour adjusting and messing with highlights and shadows. For the text, I tried out quite few fonts and spent way too much time scrolling through DaFont.com, but nothing was really working. If you can’t find it, make it yourself, so make I did! I hand wrote the text with a brush pen which took MANY attempts! For the inside of the cards I kept them very simple, just taking a few elements from the font and slapping them in the corners.
For all the other cards, I was given quite restrictive briefs. I tried my best to make them still feel like me, but they did end up having quite a commercial look to them. They look very similar to the thousand’s of cards which already exist, but its not me I’m trying to please here! For the second card, my brief was presents. I added in the bear and dog to make it a bit more playful although the bear get the chop… I’m not bitter about it at all.
When it came to adding the foliage, I realised the green from my colour mock, wasn’t working. Instead I stuck to the same colour pallet of the presents and reused a few flowers from the bird house piece I made a while ago. This helped save time as I was very much against the clock with this job! I created two colour ways for this card - I prefer the cream background, however the purple one was chosen as the final… I just have a personal hatred against this shade of purple!
For the rest of the cards, I’ll talk about them briefly as it was very much a rinse and repeat process and I don’t want this blog post getting too long!
For card number three the brief was a cocktail. Below you can see my first attempt at this concept, going for a tropical theme. I must admit, I wasn’t the most excited about this brief, so I added in the fruit to make it feel a bit more exciting. Unfortunately, this design was a little on the busy side for what the client was after, so I had to edit it down a lot for it to be approved.
Making the final art work
The finished card
Brief four - a cute cafe with cakes in the window
Now this was a brief which felt a lot more like me… a little more interesting than a cocktail! I approached this more like my usual collages and made the piece almost entirely traditionally and was very much in my element. For this I combined a bunch of reference pictures together and made a lot of it up, so having a detailed mock really helped what it came to making the final piece.
For the final card I was asked to add on a few extra details, which would have been impossibly small to add traditionally - like the fairy lights and bunting. This means I have two version of the artwork: the Birthday version, and the normal version which I’ll turn in to a print!
Brief 5 - plant, plants and more plants
In the pictures below you can see my first pass at the brief next to the the final approved mock with a few tweaks made to it. I just had to remove a plant and resize a few things to make more room for the text.
The final card
Brief 6 - Balloons
I had to make quite a lot of changes to my first pass for this one: altering colours, toning down the flowers and streamers and moving the text placement. I personally prefer the composition of the first one but alas it wasn’t meant to be!
And with that I was done! Shortly after submitting this card, I was told the job had been changed from 13 designs to 6 as they want to see how the cards perform before asking for more. On one hand, it would have been nice to complete the full collection, but on the other, I was more than happy to move on from these, as I’m all Birthday Card-ed out! Seeing them all together like this, I’m really happy with them. Of course there are ones which I much prefer (mainly the cafe and the insects), but for my first ever commercial freelance job, I did good.
PS, image all the yellowish bits (minus the sunflowers and orange slice) will be finished with gold foil, so will be lovely and shiny on the printed cards!
