All That Glitters

With the holidays a distant memory, sharing the cards of 2010 seems long overdue. It’s a safe bet that all invites and holiday greetings have been received by now, so this is not a spoiler post – just a peek at one of the projects that occupied many of our December evenings.

Last year, we designed a hand-lettered invitation for our New Years Eve party, and we learned our lesson – there would be no hand-lettering anything but envelopes this year. We wanted to stick with the gold theme, and our eagerness to test out a digital cutter led us to a design featuring a cutout candelabra, and a much more modern, minimal look than 2009.

We layered cut black cardstock on the front and back over a white and reflective gold center layer. A holiday greeting was penned on the card front with gold ink, and vellum sheets featuring invite details were layered over the lettering. The cards were inserted into white envelopes, and addressed in gold ink.

After cutting all of the black card-fronts, we had dozens of candelabra cutouts floating around. We decided to use these both on holiday cards, and on the menu cards for our party.

We love the look of opaque gold and white on dark papers, and I’ve played around with a slew of materials to try to get the perfect effect. For this particular project, given the volume and our desire to not have me slaving over copperplate lettering for weeks, we used Sharpie paint markers in gold to write greetings and address envelopes in a less formal copperplate variation.

The trickiest part of designing for papercut, is making sure that all of the pieces you need remain intact. We had a slight miscalculation in this regard – but since it was only one small free-floating piece, we glued them in to the finished cards during assembly.

As it turns out, reflective gold is difficult (for me) to capture well in photographs – but when it works, look at the glimmer!

All in all, we were very happy with the end result, and are definitely considering putting a variation of this design into production. What do you think? Did you receive any notably awesome holiday cards this year?