How to Make Your Own Designer Holiday Cards

Considering I start doing my Christmas cards at the beginning of November, this post is long overdue.

My guest post for today over at Modern Parents Messy Kids pushed me to finally put something together, so go check out that post, and come on back here for a read!

Last year, I used some fun graphics and sayings, and designed and printed my own Christmas cards on DIY wedding invitations. That's right, wedding invitations. They're blank, so who says you can't use them for other things, right?

This year I decided to do our first ever holiday photo card, mostly because we actually had a professional photo to work with.

There are so many amazing options now for photo cards, but two of my favourite sites are tinyprints and minted. The pricing and quality can't be beat for professional, custom cards, and if you have the time and the want for them, they are definitely worth consideration.

I decided to do something on my own this year, however, and was more than pleased with the results. I took our professional photo, added a little "faux snow" and a holiday greeting on my graphics program, converted to .jpg, and uploaded it online to be printed and picked up at Wally World just a couple hours later. I can't believe how fast it was (I honestly haven't had my digital photos turned to prints in years), and how well my graphics turned out super-imposed on the photo. I even made one print with two smaller photos, so my one 20 cent photo gave me two prints (10 cents each, woo hoo!). Now, I still like to write a personal message, so I include these prints in the sleeve of an actual card and not alone, but everybody does it differently!

I've been pounding away at writing the Christmas cards ever since, and with each photo I tape into the card, I'm more and more happy with how it turned out, and how inexpensive it was.

Best of all, if I run out of cards, I can just order more.

Here are some samples I designed to show you all the options you can have if you make your own.

My favourite part about printing your own photo cards is that you can mix and match. You could have 4 different photos (say a family photo, a baby photo, a dog photo, etc) and have 4 different photo card designs to send to people. There are no minimums on how many you can print, so if you only want 10 photo cards of your dog, then go for it! Options, people! How amazing is that?

To make your prints look even more custom, try using a corner punch (buy at Walmart or Michaels) to round off the edges, or frame your print with some card stock.

If you aren't so sure how to custom design your own cards, my guest post at MPMK has all the cheater tricks you could ever ask for (no graphic skills required!)

So what do you think? Do you like this idea for last minute Christmas photo cards?

(Who would believe me if I told you my two model families are actually BOTH Smith families. No seriously, they are. No joke.)