From Sketch to Shelf: The Design Process of My Animal Greeting Cards

I do find it hard to explain it as most of the ideas happen in my head and then go straight to the final design, with little to show for the development stage. This was always something I struggled with at school and university as you needed to show your research and development for coursework, so I’d often work backwards from my final design to have enough work. After university, when I started working for a fashion brand, it worked in my favour as everything was so fast-paced we needed to get to the final design quickly. But I will try my best to explain my process for you on a few designs I found with sketches!

Greeting Card Design

For greeting cards, I have quite a signature style of coloured text paired with a dotty animal drawing. I stuck to this style quite early on with one of my first card designs - my ‘Jurassic Party’ card. I liked the simplicity of the design and it worked for me so I’ve stuck with that since. Because I have this one style, I don’t really research other greeting cards to see what's trending, the comparison starts to kick in or I'm nervous that I’d subconsciously copy something without meaning to or become overwhelmed at how great everyone else is. My main source of research is looking at animal photos - not a bad thing to have to do for work... 

If I’m designing for a specific occasion, I’ll start by scrolling through animal photos on free photo sites, google images, social media or I’ll watch an animal documentary. This usually triggers an idea after I see an animal in a certain position or doing something funny. I have a lot of saved images that I’m yet to use because I can’t think of an idea for text or an occasion they’d suit. 

Other times, I’ll just randomly think of an idea for text or composition and work backwards to find an animal to suit it. I’ll grab any piece of paper I have and jot ideas down, most of the time only I can make sense of them 😅
 

Now this design went on a journey! I saw a photo of an Emperor penguin with its baby (left drawing) and thought it would make a great Father’s Day card (as it's the male Emperor Penguins who look after the baby whilst the females go out to hunt for food 💪). I had the drawing for months but I couldn’t come up with anything funny to say to explain why the father looked almost confused at what he was looking at. Then one day, I had a stroke of genius (quite a rare thing), where I thought what if both parents were looking down at the baby (middle sketch) and voila! As soon as I had that idea the text came easily and without knowing it, I had created my new best-selling card 🐧.

You can browse these and the rest of my greeting cards here.

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Thanks for reading!

Catherine