The Westwood Card Company is hiring, and you’re being considered for the job. Congratulations!
To get the position, you’ll need to come up with one or more greeting card designs. These designs will actually be handed out to people on staff for various reasons/occasions:
- Birthday
- Congratulations (marriage, baby, new job)
- Farewell (going to a different job)
- Retirement
- Condolences (death in the family)
Often, lot of people end up signing these cards, so leave a lot of blank space on the inside (although it doesn’t have to be white! Just make sure it’s light enough to write on and read.)
They can be funny (in appropriate ways and appropriate circumstances) or sincere.
Of course, if you want to make your own card for your own reason, that’s fine too.
Some tips/suggestions:
Bright, colourful, and creative are really important in a card. You don’t want it boring and dull, and you don’t want your card to look like other cards out there. Have fun with it!
HIGH QUALITY, especially ORIGINAL artwork is a MUST! If you’re googling random card elements and backgrounds, you won’t get the marks or have the success that you would if you designed something yourself! Think about using Photoshop or Illustrator to design elements! If you absolutely need to insert images from somewhere else, consider a place like UNSPLASH where you can get really high-quality photographs that you have permission to use!
InDesign is DEFINITELY the right application to use to put it all together, but you could design elements or pages in Photoshop or Illustrator and then place them into the InDesign document.
Ideal InDesign document setup:
If you set up your page correctly, you will see a .25 inch margin (the purple line on the page)
and a .25 inch Bleed (the red line outside of the page)
Any background elements that go to the edge of the page need to extend out to that Bleed line and will be cut off. Any important text or images on top should be kept within the margin.
Page layout:
On your Pages panel you’ll notice that the pages start laid out like this:
We want those pages to all be side by side, instead of those lonely pages 1 and 4. At the top right of the Pages panel, there are three little lines. Click ’em!
Turn on “Allow Selected Spread to Shuffle”
And drag your pages so that they are all side by side
When your card is printed and folded, the pages go like this:
You’re encouraged to put your name in the copyright section (if you want credit) and add some kind of logo. I encourage you to make up your own logo!
Remember that in this program, everything goes in a frame. You’ll PLACE your files into frames (File/Place or Ctrl + D).
When you are done, you’ll PACKAGE your file to drop it off!
Check for errors or missing links!
SAMPLES from previous students:
