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| 11 Nov 2008 09:15:17 pm |
 Christmas Card Design for Park Portraits |
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Finally a new Christmas card design! I don't know where the time goes but I thought I'd throw this up, after all its been a year.
This card works great for portraits in a park setting. The warm brown color complements the scenery well. The sample picture here was a scouting portrait so the clothes were not given any consideration.
Note the image actually prints lighter than you see here.
You can download it at:
Greeting card template design downloads |
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Posted By : Marcy
| Category : Christmas cards |  Comments[2] |  Trackbacks [0]
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| 11 Dec 2007 12:58:16 pm |
| Christmas Portrait Card Template Free Download |
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By request, I've added the Expressions Christmas portrait card to the download area.
The expressions card allows you to add ten or more small images to the front of the card. Great if you have many expressions and just can't choose one or you have many kids to 'show off'.
Also, works great as a kissables card. Add images of feet, hands, eye, etc.
You can download at the temporary Greeting card template design area.
Template downloads are free. |
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Posted By : Marcy
| Category : Christmas cards | Comments[8] | Trackbacks [0]
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| 06 Nov 2007 08:42:49 am |
| Download Free Christmas Portrait Greeting Card Design |
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Some people have requested the designs of my greeting cards. While I have a website in development to allow for download of designs, it isn't completely tested yet. In the mean time, I have setup a temporary location for downloading a few designs.
Right now the only designs there are the Elegant gold foil cards. These are based on a black background with gold accents. Great for sibling or family Christmas photo card designs.
However, I may add some more or if you have specific requests, please feel free to leave a comment to this post. If you do not want your comment to be public, just put the word "private" at the beginning of the comment and I won't show it in the blog.
You can download the designs from Free Website Downloads. |
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Posted By : Marcy
| Category : Christmas cards | Comments[9] | Trackbacks [0]
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| 27 Nov 2006 06:24:57 pm |
| Nautical Family Christmas Photo Card Design Ideas and tips |
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I like this card because it has a nice clean design, looks very professional on the outside and then flips open to some fun.
The client wanted the familly portrait on the boat at mid-afternoon. Not a great time, but we worked with it. I got one really good shot of everyone smiling at the camera and that was the 'centerpiece' shot. The one for the front. We also decided we wanted to show off the whole boat on the back. Though I did not have my wide angle lens with me, I was able to get enough of the boat in the shot.
To integrate the front and the back, I chose to use a nice thick red stripe that bordered the images on the top and bottom and carried from the front to the back. I think that's what really makes this card work.
For the inside, we knew we had some fun shots from a different vantage point on the boat, so we used one of those and faded the edges to crop out everything but the head. And of course, the little message to the right really tied everything together.
I liked the design of this card so much I did something very similar for a card from a recent beach session. So next post, I'll show that one off. |
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Posted By : Marcy
| Category : Christmas cards | Comments[0] | Trackbacks [0]
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| 10 Nov 2006 02:38:14 am |
| Custom Family Portrait Christmas Card Design Tips and Ideas |
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Everyone is asking for Christmas Photo Card design ideas, so I'll postpone the family posing ideas post till a later time. Newborn photography and baby photography are so rewarding, but one of the most rewarding aspects of my job is designing custom birth announcements and greeting cards. Hopefully by sharing these ideas with all of you, I've inspired some creativity in your own designs.
So I'm going to walk you through some of my design ideas. I'm going to use some images from a recent family portrait session at the park.
One of the reasons I chose these images is to demonstrate some creative ideas for designing a 'sibling' Christmas photo card where one of the siblings isn't quite enthusiastic about the session.
I knew from previous sessions with the kids, that this Christmas card photo session might be a little challenging to get a good image of the two of them together. So I had planned to take some close-ups and crop later. As it turned out, it was a good idea. So you'll see in the designs below that I predominantly designed around tight face crops.
I also knew going in to the shoot that 'black' would be the color of choice. The kids would be wearing black, and the mom is partial to black backgrounds.
So with that setup, let's jump right in!
Custom Photo Christmas card 1: Close-up of pink skirt
The inspiration for this one came from a creative cropping exercise. I knew I wanted to have two tightly cropped face shots but I wanted more than just a plain black background. So I made a small file in photoshop and added an image from the session. Since the image is way bigger than the file I'm using I can easily move the image around to find an interesting area to crop out.
My original thought was to get a nice close-up crop of the rocks. But after doing the cropping exercise, I found that a close-up of the skirt with the ribbons provided a beautiful Christmas feel. Then I just added borders to the insert pictures and added a little drop shadow to give depth.
The last item I added was the Christmas message. By offsetting the two insert images, I found the perfect placement for the Christmas message.
Custom Photo Christmas card 2: Tarnished gold foil frames
This is my absolute favorite. In fact when I saw the actual printed card I wowed myself! Although originally designed for the front of the card, the client chose to use it on the inside. At 7"x10", the impact of the image on the inside is fantastic. She made a wise choice.
For this design, I wanted something contemporary yet elegant. I thought the gold accents on black would help me achieve that look. The design is actually quite simple. I use a varying opacity gold ribbon to connect the key images and a tarnished gold frame around the images.
Then I added the words "happy holidays" in a script font in various sizes and opacities to the background (barely noticeable) to give it a bit of a contemporary feel.
Choosing the images was also easy. Two small, tightly cropped face shots work great to add some smiles to accent the sibling picture in the middle where they weren't smiling.
Design 3: Expressions card
Although the sample image here doesn't fully show off the potential of this card it is a great design for a session where you get a lot of great expressions from the subjects - usually small kids. So now you don't have to choose just one expression, you can choose as many as you want. The size of the squares or rectangles can change to based on how many images you want on the front.
This also works great when you need to show off multiple kids. Here I alternated different pictures of each of the two girls. You could do the same with more kids and even add in Mom, Dad, and fido. Or, you could make a combo birth announcement and Christmas card by using 'kissable' images from a newborn session. By 'kissables' I mean toes, hands, head, etc.
In this design, I did not fill up every rectangle with a photo, however there's no reason why you couldn't do that. You could have a big center rectangle where the child is wearing a Santa hat. Or you could leave enough space between the rectangles to put a Christmas message between the rows of pictures.
I chose to put the message in the rectangles. Now you could put a full word or phrase in each rectangle or just one rectangle or you could mix it up like I did. In fact I not only mixed up the messages, I mixed up the font, the font size, the opacity, and the placement within the rectangle. However, even though you don't see "Merry Christmas" all at once, the brain makes the connection and gets the message. I chose to design it this way in order to break up the monotony of all images and make the overall look more interesting.
Another fun idea for the Christmas card is to put a short sentence about each child in a rectangle. You'll probably want to use bigger rectangles or squares in that case. But you could say something like "Johnny is learning to read at 5 years old" or "Mary has started piano lessons" or whatever it is they'd like to share.
Design 4: Simple card
I wanted to show this card because it's a nice simple design and works equally well with a green background and a black background. The image is cropped and framed with two pinstripes of a color from the baby's shirt. Then, using the same color for the font I vary the opacity of a Christmas message to create visual interest.
I chose a font that was slightly ornate but very readable. I didn't want a plain arial font because the card was already very simple. I wanted a more festive font. And, since the opacities of the two words were different, it was very easy to nestle one word right under the other and keep the message very readable.
If you don't like black background, this one can easily be change to a green that matches the green in the baby's shirt.
I hope if nothing else I've inspired some creative designs in you. If you're looking for help with some creative card designs for your studio, give me a call as I am available for contract work.
Next time we'll take a look at some white card designs from outdoor sessions. |
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Posted By : Marcy
| Category : Christmas cards | Comments[7] | Trackbacks [0]
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