Tag: Create-A-Greeting-Card Scholarship

3rd Annual Create-A-Greeting-Card Scholarship Design Process – Part 3

We have arrived at the third and final part of our “Making a Winning Doodle into a Dazzling Christmas Card Design” series. So far in Parts 1 and 2, we’ve gone through the process of scanning the image, cleaning the image up, changing the artwork to fill space, and separating the image to determine colors and finishing techniques. We’re almost done, and soon we’ll have a beautiful holiday card.

The creative team has gotten together to give critiques and advice on how they feel the design should look. At this point in the process the Creative Coordinator decides which colors and styles will be tested. There are many different colors of paper stock, and some of these different colored stocks will be tested with various inks or foils, depending on the design. The card is sent to production so the creative team has a chance to actually see all the different choices, and decide which will be the best-seller.

Here is a look at the design in the early process of separation to see which colors or foils would look best.

Create-A-Greeting-Card Contest Scholarship Winning Design

When the cards come back from production there are many different styles to choose from. This is an important step in the design process, as the Gallery Collection is always looking for the most visually appealing and creative Christmas cards. Here are some examples of the different foils and colors that were tested to determine the final appearance of our winning card.

Some of the different color combinations to choose from included buff cards with green foil, and white cards with multi-colored foil.

Design Concept - Buff Card with Green Foil Design Concept - White Card with Multi-Colored Foil

The Gallery Collection also offers a wide array of beautiful dark stock cards. Since there were so many options we just had to test them all!

Design Concept - Dark Blue Card with Silver Foil Design Concept - Dark Red Cards with Gold Foil
Design Concept - Dark Green Card with Gold Foil Concept Design - Black Card with Multi-Colored Foil

The creative team will once again gather to review and discuss the different holiday cards. They will decide what works and what doesn’t work in terms of color, style and finishing. They will also decide if any revisions need to be made to the final design. With so many choices and options, this isn’t always an easy process. But in the end it’s worth it, as the Gallery Collection has some of the most visually stunning cards available.

After much discussion, a final design is chosen. It combines the beauty of Lauren’s winning artwork with the amazing skills of our creative team. Two amazing cards were made from this one beautiful design, and they will truly take your breath away!

Design #798CW - Holiday Tree Christmas Card
Design #798CW - Holiday Tree Christmas Card

Design #730CW - Snowman Surprise Christmas Card
Design #730CW
Snowman Surprise
Christmas Card

Every design that graces the cover of our catalogs and is displayed on our website must adhere the high quality standards of the Gallery Collection. Changes are made to most designs, whether it’s sizing, color, or addition of foil. So whether the design has been submitted by one of our talented artists, or the design is a scholarship winning contest entry, they all go through the same process. This ensures that we always have the most beautiful, high quality greeting cards around.

3rd Annual Create-A-Greeting-Card Scholarship Design Process – Part 2

In Part 1 of our “Making a Winning Doodle into a Dazzling Christmas Card Design” series we discussed the scanning process of the original artwork from the scholarship contest. Now we delve further into the process of creating a card.

The original artwork is given a Hi-Res scanning into our system, where a graphics program makes the image nice and crisp. This cleaning process makes the art suitable for reproduction. Once the image is set the production person, or Imager, gets to work.

The Imager has many different things to do at this point. Lauren’s artwork needed to be changed to fill space. The original piece was vertical, and the personalized Christmas cards that will feature this design will be both vertical and horizontal. The artwork is proportioned for a horizontal holiday card so that all the aspects of the original design are not lost.

This is Lauren’s artwork after it has been scanned, cleaned and revised.

Create-A-Greeting-Card Scholarship Contest Winning Artwork

The image then goes through a separation process. The Imager prepares the file, determining the different colors and finishing techniques to be used on this particular Christmas card design. There are many different options for each piece of art, including ink color choices, die-cutting, foil stamping and foil embossing.

The creative team will gather together and discuss these choices. Everyone will share their insights and give critiques and advice on how they feel the design should look. This creative input helps to make the final design a unique vision for the Gallery Collection and the Christmas card itself a thing of beauty.

The artwork that Lauren submitted to the scholarship contest is coming to fruition through the hard work and creative minds of the Imagers and everyone on the creative team. This design will become personalized holiday cards that Lauren, and everyone at the Gallery Collection, will be very proud of.

Coming up in Part 3, our final installment, we’ll share how the final decisions on colors, foils and the appearance of the card as a whole are made. You won’t want to miss this!

Christmas Card Winning Scholarship Design Turns from Doodle to Dazzling! An Inside Look at the Process – Part 1

How exactly do we take the simple line drawing submitted by Lauren Ondreko, winner of our 3rd annual Create-A-Greeting-Card $10,000 Scholarship contest, and turn it into a potential best seller in our Christmas cards line? You are about to get a rare glimpse inside the process of how a leading publisher of business Christmas cards (yes, that would be us) works some holiday magic!

The contest was a very exciting one this year; with so many talented student artists and photographers submitting their work, the decision was a difficult one. After much deliberation, we finally chose the design submitted by Lauren Ondreko from Friendswood High School in Friendswood, Texas.

Lauren’s artwork, a beautiful line drawing filled with symbols of the holiday season, turned out to prove a somewhat controversial choice as our winner of the $10,000 prize. It was a truly fine piece of art that just so happened to be submitted on a sheet of loose leaf paper! The submission style of the art work caused a bit of a stir, but in the end it was the design that won, and not the medium on which it was received.

Here at the Gallery Collection there is a wonderful creative team who, year after year, successfully turns out some of the most beautiful and original Christmas cards in the greeting cards market today. So just what did they do to this winning doodle to make it into one of our holiday cards that people everywhere will want to purchase?

It all started with the design itself. The original design received a Hi-Res scanning into our system. Once the image had been scanned, it was cleaned up with a graphics program. This takes all of the fine line work and makes it smooth and neat for reproduction.

Here is the original artwork submitted by Lauren for the scholarship contest.

CAGC Scholarship Contest Original Artwork

This is what Lauren’s drawing looked like after it had been scanned into the system, but before the image had been cleaned up.

CAGC Scholarship Contest Scanned Artwork

The artwork cleaning process is an important one. Sharpening the image makes the art suitable for reproduction, which in turn makes a beautiful holiday card. Without this process the image could appear rough or blurry, and would be unfit for use. Once the image had been properly taken care of the production person, or Imager, got to work their own magic on the design!

The next step of the process will follow the design as it moved through the Imager’s hands. Lauren’s art was ready to begin the creative journey of colors, spacing, and everything else that would make it the dazzling Christmas card it was destined to become. Stay tuned for Part 2 and Part 3, where we will give you the inside scoop on just how that happened!

An Insider’s Look at the Judging of our Annual Create-A-Greeting-Card $10,000 Scholarship Contest

Well it didn’t take too long after we announced this year’s winner of our 3rd Annual Create-A-Greeting Card $10,000 Scholarship Contest to start hearing from some folks who found our choice a bit perplexing or found some other little nuance in the design that they took issue with.

That’s ok. We get it. We realized when we pick this year’s winner that there might be a few lifted eye brows given some of the other excellent finalists also in the running. In the infamous words of Ricky Ricardo do we have some “splainin’ to do?”

Well, yes and no. 🙂 You see, ultimately it is up to our judging panel, and believe us, they spend many hours behind closed doors, drinking way too much coffee and Diet Coke trying to whittle down the choices while taking many different things into consideration during the process.

So just what are those factors that lurk in the minds of our astute judges? Well…it turns out there are some obvious things that are considered and perhaps some not so obvious things. So if you are one of the people thinking of entering our next scholarship contest and you are smart enough to be reading this, you just might learn something that will be of value to you.

The Judging Criteria (not limited to the following):

1)  Does the design concept seem to “fit” in our existing line of Christmas, Birthday or other All-Occasion designs?

2)  We look for a spark of creativity, something fresh in the card design.

3)  We don’t judge a greeting card design by its cover. Kind of ironic isn’t it? Meaning, we don’t just look at what was submitted to us “as is”. We look at it to see what a design is capable of becoming once in the hands of our expert team who will apply the techniques and treatments we are renowned for such as embossing, bright colored or refractory foils, and maybe a dash of glitter.

4)  The genre in which design is made whether it be a painting, a hand drawn sketch, a photograph…how ever it was created does not play a big factor in the decision making process as proven by this year’s pick. Yes, a simple yet appealing doodle can actually win because we believe we can turn it into a top selling card.

5)  Now, here is the one thing virtually no one might think of that we absolutely must consider! How will this design look in the media in which we advertise? You see, our cards are not sold in stores, so we must rely on our print catalogs and web pages to illustrate the beauty of our greeting cards designs. Even if we think a design is breathtaking, if we don’t think it will translate well into that media then it is likely ruled out.

6)  Last but not least, and this should come as no surprise folks, the design must be original. Not only must it be original but the winner needs to be able to provide us with the final art. So if we find out that a design was a gift from the clip art fairy or somehow created out of some other less than original means, well please understand we simply cannot use it!

Hopefully this will shed some light on how we go about picking the winner of our Create-A-Greeting Card $10,000 Scholarship Contest. So take out a paintbrush, a pencil, a pen or your favorite digital camera and get busy on your chance to design the next top selling Christmas card or All-Occasion design. Good luck to all and thank you to everyone who put the time and effort into our past contests.

*Disclaimer: This blog post is a reflection of the writer’s interpretation of the judging process and in no way changes or amends the scholarship rules. Furthermore, the writer is not a part of the judging panel.

The Finalists have been Chosen

After sorting through the 8,000+ entries received for the 3rd Annual Create-A-Greeting-Card $10,000 Scholarship Contest, our judges picked 143 designs to qualify as finalists. We’ve created a slideshow that displays all of the finalists’ designs, so please be sure to check it out.

If you are a finalist, we encourage you to share the good news with your family and friends. We’ve made each slide an individual link, so you can email the URL to your greatest fans. Link information is located in the white box below each slide. If you or someone you know has a blog or website, we’ve also provided some basic code to make linking to your slide as easy as pie!

After the slideshow was put up, our judges found out that a few of the designs were not original. Please note that those designs were disqualified from the finalist pool and removed from the slideshow. Originality is a key factor for this scholarship contest. Please keep this in mind when you submit your entry for the 4th Annual Create-A-Greeting-Card $10,000 Scholarship Contest.