Just Make the Card | Studio Rule
The first card doesn’t have to be perfect. Sometimes making it is the only way to discover what a design needs next. Here’s why Just Make the Card became one of my Studio Rules.
One of my favorite parts of designing greeting cards comes just after the initial idea has formed and I’ve sketched it out. That’s when I begin designing digitally, moving shapes around, adjusting the size of an image, lining everything up, and imagining how different colors and papers might work together. I can lose hours there. There is always one more thing I can tweak before I cut it in paper.
A few months ago, I spent an entire afternoon imagining different combinations of cake layers. Chocolate cake with orange frosting. Vanilla cake with pink and yellow. Purple cake with shades of green. Confetti cake with brightly colored sprinkles. I could change the colors on the screen almost as quickly as I could imagine a new combination, which meant there was almost no limit to how many I could try.
This is one reason I’ve learned to give myself deadlines when I’m designing. Eventually, the clock wins. I have to stop moving things around on the screen, choose a direction, and find out whether the design actually works in paper.
That led to one of my first Studio Rules: Just Make the Card. Depending on how long I’ve been staring at the screen, the version I say to myself may or may not contain more expressive words.
Just Make the Card
I developed this rule after realizing there is a point when continuing to work on the screen stops giving me useful information. Eventually, I need to cut the pieces, choose the actual papers, assemble the layers, and see what happens when the design becomes a physical greeting card.
Bad Beats Perfection
One thing I have to actively remind my perfectionist brain is this: I don’t need that first card to be perfect. I just need it to exist, because once it does, I have something I can evaluate. In fact, I expect the first card to be bad. That’s part of its job.
The Good in the Bad
Construction
A design can look completely reasonable on the screen and turn out to be ridiculously difficult to cut, weed, layer, or glue together. Tiny details disappear. Narrow pieces tear. Layers that seemed easy to assemble digitally become difficult to align in paper. Sometimes making the card reveals that I’ve designed something that technically works, but is far more complicated than it needs to be.
Proportion
One of the first things I look for is whether the proportions actually work. I can design an image to fit perfectly inside a 5 × 7 rectangle on the screen, but somehow that scale never seems to translate exactly the way I expect it to once the pieces are cut. An image can suddenly feel too large, too small, or slightly off compared with the amount of white space around it.
Composition
Next, I look at how everything works together on the card. Something can be the right size and still feel wrong once I see it in place. An image may need to move higher or lower, lettering may need more room, or the space between elements may feel too crowded or too empty. Small changes in placement can completely change the balance of the finished design.
Color
Finally, I look closely at how the colors work together once I’m holding the actual papers. A combination that looked great on the screen might not work at all in paper. Glitter and foil reflect light, some colors become stronger when they’re layered, and others seem to disappear. Even the texture or finish of a paper can change how the colors around it look.
Keep, Change, Make Again
Once I’ve inspected the first card, I make notes about what works, what I want to keep, and what I think needs to change. Then I take the card to Michael. As he looks it over, I add his feedback to my notes. He brings a fresh set of eyes to a design I may have been staring at for hours, and sometimes he catches things I missed or sees something differently than I do.
Then I take my notes back to the design and decide what I want to change before making the card again.
This is where things can get interesting. Sometimes I take Michael’s feedback too far and remove something he actually loved about the first card. Sometimes the changes make the design noticeably better. And sometimes I show him the next version and we both look at it and wonder what the hell happened.
So I keep iterating. I compare each new version against the ones that came before it, keep the changes that work, undo the ones that don’t, and try something else when neither of us is convinced. Eventually, there are fewer things left to change and more things I know I want to keep.
Making Is Designing
I used to think I needed to solve as much of the design as possible before I started cutting paper. Now I know there are parts of a card I simply can’t solve that way. Some decisions require me to stop designing on the screen and start designing with the actual materials in my hands.
That’s why Just Make the Card has stuck around as one of my Studio Rules. It reminds me that the first card doesn’t have to be the answer. Sometimes it just needs to give me the next question.
And Yes, I Made the Cake Cards
Remember all those cake combinations I was playing with at the beginning? I did eventually stop moving colors around on the screen and make the cards. I started with eight different versions, each with its own combination of cake, frosting, and glitter paper.
And because eight cards wasn’t quite enough, I made two more and donated all ten birthday cards to Wicked Good Cards.
Want to see how the cake itself came together? Read Designing a Birthday Card from Scratch: Piece of Cake.
Mainely Yours, Shannon
