How to Design a Greeting Card/Birthday Card in Canva: Birthday cards and greeting cards are easy to make, and are always making sales. Think about it – there are always birthdays, holidays, new births, celebrations. If you make cards that look great, then you will be able to sell them.
Today, I’m going to show you 3 tools that will make it super easy to get started with your very own birthday card business.
1. Canva
Canva is the king of easy design creation. Whether it’s t-shirt, book covers, or anything else – Canva leads the way in helping anyone create amazing designs. The software allows you to create designs that you’d normally need to be an expert in Photoshop to achieve, thanks to their multitude of effects and drag-and-drop options.
Canva is free to use, and most of the features don’t require you to upgrade to the paid model. If you require things like a background remover, stock images, transparent PNGs and to be able to save designs as templates (we’ll cover this more later), then you might want to upgrade.
If you don’t have a free Canva account yet, then you can sign up here. Next, you’ll want to choose “Create a Design” from the top right-hand corner and choose “Custom Size”. Make sure you change the measurements from px (pixels) to in (inches) before you proceed. Now you can fill in your width and height – 11.2“ x 8.2”. The regular size of a card is usually 5.8” x 8.2”, however because we will be creating the front and back cover together – we need to make our canvas 11.2“ x 8.2”. This will make more sense once we start creating our design.
Greeting cards can be created with a simple image and some emotional text. By combing the 2 we can create something that buyers are interested in. When these sheets are printed, they will be folded down the center, created a front and back of the card. Everything on the right side of the screen will be the front of the card, while everything on the left will be the back. You will need to design your card appropriately.
2. Copy.ai
When it comes to creating emotional text – I’m pretty terrible at it. However, there is a tool for that as well.
Copy.ai is an AI content generation tool. If you’ve never used a GPT-3 AI tool before, then you may be thinking that there’s no way software could create well-written emotional text. You’d be very wrong. This technology has made huge leaps and bounds over the last few years, and now is indistinguishable from human text.
You can use the free version of Copy.ai here. Under the Personal Tools section, you’ll find the Birthday Card and Love Letter tools. These are able to create amazing text according your description.
Example:
“As our 10 years come to an end, I feel it is time to express my gratitude towards you. These past ten years have been so amazing that I cannot believe how your friendship has helped me through them. You were there for me through the good and the bad times and for that I thank you. Happy Birthday!”
“This has been one of the most amazing years of our lives. Thank you for making me laugh. Thank you for making every night our anniversary. And thank you for turning my fears into hopes and for being such an amazing father of our children. You are amazing!”
3. Vexels / Creative Fabrica
Every card needs good images – either for the background or as a character that stands out and calls for attention.
There are 2 websites that I use to get my images.
Creative Fabrica – has a ton of images, fonts, backgrounds and anything else you might need for a design project. I regularly call it my toolbox, as I always login to find something or other.
You can sign up for a free account here. They have a freebie section where you can get free images and fonts for your designs.
Vexels – Vexels is a site that’s focused on more POD (print-on-demand) images. I use them a lot too because they have images that can’t be found anywhere else. Their team of designers is constantly creating new high quality images for their community.
Once you’ve found a nice image and added some meaningful text, you’ll have a design ready to use on your birthday or greeting cards. You can choose to sell your design either physically or digitally.
If you want to sell physical cards, you can create an account on Printful, who specializes in print on demand products. Upload your image to their website and place it on a greeting card template. You can then sell your cards through either Etsy or your own website. You will only pay Printful for printing and postage once someone buys one of your cards. Read up more about selling your cards with Printify and Etsy here: How to Make and Sell Birthday/Anniversary Cards on Etsy
