I am a great believer in expressing joy and love which I do from time to time :D. There are many ways to express love but the one that I am going to talk about today is expressing love with greeting cards. I love to give cards to my lovely wife but then knowing her, she would hate if I spend heaps of money behind cards and on top of that I do not get personal satisfaction. Also ready made greeting cards do not always give the message that you want to give out. Hence I prefer to make my own greeting card.
Of course there are online sites which offer free greeting cards, but they just don’t do the trick for me.
There are couple of ways to do this. One is to make it all by your hand and write on it and second is to use your computer, Internet skills to make one personalized greeting card. Obviously being a geek, I prefer the second method and also it does not show my incompetency at not knowing how to draw properly.
What all do you need to make a greeting card yourself?
1. A4 or any other suitable size paper. Possibly good quality paper is desired is you are going to print
2. Sketch pens, pencil, rubber, ruler, cutter, color pen
3. If you are going to use computer to make the card then you might need connection to the Internet to get photos/content etc.
4. A color printer
5. One could use simple software such as Microsoft Paint or sophisticated online tools such Microsoft Publisher or Adobe Photoshop
If you are going to make use of your creative skills and make your own card painting or writing on them, but there is no problems at all. It’s great. But if you are one of those who wants to use Internet and computer to create greeting cards then read on.
First of all decide on the theme of the greeting card. What message is the card going to give. Based on the theme you will need to either find content/write content and also you will have to find suitable pictures for it. Once the theme is decided one could use the power of Internet to look for pictures. One can look for pictures on Google Images or websites such as Flickr. For Valentine Day you can search for tags such as Valentine or Valentine Day on Flickr
Save the desired image to your hard disk.
Now as said before you can use either tools such as Microsoft Paint or tools such as Microsoft Publisher to create cards. I have used Microsoft Publisher 2007 for the examples that I am showing. Microsoft Publisher 2007 already comes with greeting card templates which you can select easily.
Select the right template, select the correct paper size you want to use for the greeting (make sure your printer supports that paper size you select). Remove/insert the pictures you downloaded from the net before. In the text areas, modify the default text to personalized text content. Modify fonts to match it all, preview it and viola you are nearly done.
The picture above shows how the card can be folded as it is all printed on a A4 size paper on one side. When you print out the paper, make sure you fold it carefully so it align the paper borders.
The result is your own personalized love filled greeting card which nobody would have seen before. Well this can take as much time you want to give to this process but I think you can create your own personalized greeting card in less then 15 minutes all up. Below are some sample pics of greetings that I have created from pictures that I have borrowed from Flickr.
The joy comes from the work that you put in creating the card starting from selecting the right picture to deciding on what the perfect content is that should go in the card. It’s simple and it’s fun, something that you will remember for a long time. I bet when you send e-cards you might not remember which card you sent after a week or two!
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