How to Design Greeting Card

Video Transcript

"I am Alexis Neubert of Alexis Design and I am going to demonstrate how to make a greeting card. You want to use a page layout program such as Adobe InDesign is usually for a greeting card, you have more than one page and this way you can keep the whole document - both pages in one document. Then start by creating a new document. When creating a business card you want to keep in mind the size of the envelope. I'm sorry when creating a greeting card you want to keep in mind the size of the envelope that it will go in. For this I am going to use a standard card envelope called an A six and that would give me a card that could fold to four and a half by six and quarter for example, so to make a folding card I want to double that width and make it nine by six and a quarter. I am going to create two columns so that I can easily view the different panels and where the fold will occur. I will put a half-inch gutter, and that is the space between panels, and then I will put a quarter-inch margin all the way around. And you will see, when I have my document up that this gives you a nice way to view the space, this is where the card will fold and you will end up with even margins if you use those as a guide, and everything will be centered in each panel. So for this greeting card I am going to put a nice photo of some flowers and you can grab any images or graphics that you might have and drag and drop them on to your page in InDesign. We will just center that if you need to resize your image you can use the scale tool over in the left hand tool bar, you can select your image and use the percentages like so on the top there. So this is going to be really simple, and we will just put, create a text box with our type tool. Drag out the appropriate size box that you need and then you can start typing. Did not really want that to be all caps. And for this I think I will pick a nice script font. But you can go through and choose your fonts up here in the type pallet, and play around with the font size, until you get what you want, and make sure that you use a font that is appropriate for the subject or the occasion of your card. Think about whether it is a romantic occasion, a serious occasion, a fun happy occasion and that can be a helpful way to choose the font. And so we have a nice outside of our greeting card, and to do the inside we would just go to page two and in that same right hand panel, take our text tool. Maybe make a larger text box if there is more that you want to write. Choose a font and then type your greeting on the inside if you have one, maybe you have a blank card and you have nothing for the inside we will just put, a repeat of what we said on the front just to use as an example. Center it, give it some nice placement on the page. And you have a lovely greeting card. And that is how to create a card yourself on your computer."