How To Make Your Own Greeting Cards

Rather than having to rely on someone else’s words to express your thoughts, you can have fun creating your own greeting cards. By making your own unique and personal cards you will be able to express exactly what you want to say. The possibilities are limited only by your own imagination as to what you can come up with.  People like to receive personal cards. Receiving a card that has a personal touch to it is something special. It will make your recipient feel good to know that you spent some extra time and thought on them.

 The simplest way to create a card is to use your word processing software. You can just write some simple text, print it out, fold it in half and you’re done.  This achieves some decent results, provided you dress things up a bit by using special fonts. Graphics are almost an essential part of any effective greeting card, however.  You can use clipart or photos. Use the insert function of the word processing program to add these elements to your card.  Another special touch is to add your own artwork after you print out the text part of the card. It is just about limitless as to what you can do.  You can draw, paint, make a collage or add 3d objects. 

Fortunately, the computer has made things a bit easier for those of us that are not quite as skilled in drawing and painting. Very professional looking greeting cards can be made on your computer at home. A piece of clipart or a  photo is all that needs to be added to achieve a polished look to any card.  Don’t get too carried away with this however. It is easy to overdo things.  Remember to keep it simple.   Avoid clutter, and avoid using a lot of words.  The less words you use the better.  The best cards aren’t books or stories

With the process I touched on above, you will end up with a rather large card. Most cards however are 5x7 or 4x6 and you can find envelops that will fit these rather easily. The smaller sizes are a little more mainstream.  The simple solution to this is to print your document on 8 1/2 x 11 stock and trim it to a 7x10 size, fold it in half and you have a 5x7 card. Pretty simple. You have a little waste, but that’s not a big deal as long as you are only making a few cards, and you are not going into production and trying to sell them at a profit.

If you want a smaller size card, try laying out a couple of them on  a page and print them out.  Then trim the page to the cards. You can also pre cut your stock, size the document to the precut stock size, and print.  There is also already cut-to-size stock available in office supply stores like Office Depot. This takes a little calculation and may take more investigation into your printer’s capabilities as to printing on different size paper stocks. 

Here is how to produce a nice 5x7 card.  You can create your document as a standard 81/2 x 11 letter.  Set up the margins as:

For a horizontal card set  the right & left margins to at least one inch.  The top and the bottom at least ¾ of an inch. This is done in the page setup menu of the word processing program.

If you want to use an imaging software like Photoshop, then just create a  document that is seven inches long and ten inches high.   One thing to remember when printing is; make sure the printer is set to the “as is function”.  That is, make sure that you do not have the “scale to fit media” or other similar type of function activated.  This way the true size of the document will print out.

If the card is a vertical card, you must set the document as a landscape document, that is the page size should be 11 inches across and 8 ½ inches long. Set up your margins as at least ¾” on the right and left and at least one inch at the top and bottom of the page.  If you would like to see a sample card that you can use as a template, I have provided some free cards on this website.  

There are many programs that are designed to make greeting cards. There are far too many to list them all here.  However, “The Print Shop” is one of them.  This program does a lot more that just make cards. There are shareware versions of programs that are available for free.  Many imaging programs have templates set up in the software along with the clipart, so you can design your own cards.   With a “canned” printing program the process is pretty automated and usually is wizard driven.  That is, the program pretty much leads you through the process of creating the card.  Usually this type of software does not give you too much flexibility to customize the card.  It takes a bit of time to get to know and use the program. However, the software has already done all of the sizing work for you, and you don’t have to worry about document size and margins. So all of the set-up work is already done. Most people already have word processing software on their computers.  So now it’s just a matter of finding some good clipart and/or photos to use.  With a simple photo editor you can easily resize the art and photos to fit into your card format.  You will also have more versatility to create borders and other graphic elements, that you would not have with a simple word processing program.

To sum up, you can purchase software dedicated to making cards.  A lot of these programs are a bit complex and allow you to do all kinds of other projects, like brochures, flyers, posters etc.  There are also some programs that just make cards. You can use general imaging software, like photo editors.  You can use a word processing program to make your own greeting cards.  I have provided some free cards on my website, http://www.richardnickson.com .   You can down load these files for free and print them out. They are complete cards and all you have to do is print them on your stock, trim and fold.  You can modify them and customize them to suite your own tastes.  (You will need a program that can modify a PDF file.) These are some basics. I hope I have inspired some ideas. Now you can take it from here.