Designing a Christmas card, print to Silverlight - part one
The brief
The client, NettMore Ltd, asked me to come up with an A6 format Christmas card design that could not only be sent to existing clients, but could also be sent out to potential customers with a message of the company offering: using IT solutions to solve business problems.
The concept
The challenge was to come up with a message that followed a Christmas theme. My immediate thought was how the logo resembled a snow slope so I took the relevant parts of the logo from Illustrator into Photoshop. I then added some trees and snowflakes using Photoshop's custom shapes. I added a silhouette of Santa and some sleigh tracks as the final touch.
Although this worked as a Christmas card, it didn't really convey any company message. After a bit of thought, I had an idea about how opening a (wanted!) Christmas gift as a child is possibly one of the most pleasant of experiences. Santa is supposedly responsible for this, yet in order to deliver the experience on time, he must have a top notch back-end system: a process where a letter to Santa with a list of wants is processed, orders controlled, picked etc, and delivered to a correct address on time. This is something all IT professionals aspire to - an efficient back-end solution to deliver the perfect user experience.
SO, with this idea in mind, I wondered how on earth I could convey this idea. I decided to create a little flow chart diagram that hopefully could represent Santa's elves working in the background to a system that allowed Santa to perform his role.
Creating the design
I sketched out a few ideas - I wanted the elves to look a little anonymous, a little stylised, similar to the naive wooden Christmas decorations you see around, and almost computer generated. I therefore decided to build them out of basic shapes in Wings3d. From there, I brought them into Photoshop and coloured them with the NettMore orange duotone. They were then ready to apply to the flow chart.
Some of the other assets such as the arrows, letters etc were made in Expression Design as vector outlines and brought into Photoshop for enhancing. The dark grey back drop is based on an illustration on the NettMore website so as to stylistically maintain a sense of continuity for the brand.
On the first version of the card, I incorporated the flowchart onto the front of the card and submitted the concept to the client for feedback. Initially the idea was that the card could be single leaved rather than folded as a postcard format as required. The client confirmed that it would be a folded A6 format which provided the opportunity to move the diagram to the rear. This allowed for a more attractive card front and actually adds to the concept by physically placing the 'system' part of the concept to the back. Following feedback, the diagram was also modified so that it depicted the flow of a system more effectively. Bullets summing up the business offering were also added following the client's request.
The final design was supplied at 300dpi, CMYK, following the printer's artwork requirements.
Read part two to find out how I turned the printed card into a Silverlight animation >>
