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Friday 4 December 2015

Our Christmas Cards 2015

Disclaimer: This post is sponsored by Minted. All opinions are my own.

I'm so excited to share this year's Christmas cards with you. This year I made our cards with Minted and I'm so happy with how they turned out. Aren't they gorgeous?


When it comes to making Christmas cards, there are so many companies out there to choose from that it can be a little overwhelming. I found myself looking at so many different webpages and different styles of cards, but I kept coming back to Minted. Their designs just clicked with me. Modern yet classic. Festive but not fussy. Hand drawn designs, bold colors, letterpress and foil details, original designs by independent artists... All of these details spoke to me and I knew that Minted was the one.


The Minted website is super easy to navigate which makes choosing your card design a breeze. One of my favorite features is the "Find it Fast" option. Rather than viewing the card designs with their stock standard photos, "Find it Fast" allows users to upload the photo they'd like to use and see a preview of all designs with their photo instead. It makes the selection process so much faster. See those little color swatches under each card in the image below? They can be clicked on in this screen to preview different colors of the main text too.


I played around with a few different designs before settling on "Hand-Painted Branches" by Nikkol Christiansen. The branches tie in perfectly with the garland in the photo and I love the simplicity of the design. The color matches perfectly too! I chose rounded corners for a more refined look.   



I really like the flexibility of Minted's designs. Unlike many other card companies, the main design elements (like the word Joy and the leaves on my card) can be moved. So many times in the past I've found a card design that would be perfect if only the unmovable main text wasn't sprawled across Ava's face! It's the little touches like this that I love about Minted.

I added two photos to the back of our cards this year - mainly because I had a super cute photo of Mathilde that was just begging to be put on a card! I couldn't put just Mathilde on the back of the card though so I also included a photo of Ava and Lola watching the cable cars on Powell Street. I like adding a little touch of San Francisco to our cards for family back home in Australia. 


There are so many different options available for the card back. Each design comes with a matching pattern and color for the back or it can be personalized with photos and text. I like the idea of adding a greeting on the back because, seriously, I do not have enough time to write out all those Christmas cards by hand!


Speaking of not having enough time... one of my most favorite things about making my Christmas cards with Minted is their recipient addressing service. Talk about a time saver. Rather than spending hours handwriting out addresses on envelopes I was able to upload a spreadsheet of addresses to my order and, voila! - my envelopes came addressed and ready to go. All I need to do is add a stamp and I'm done. And even better, that spreadsheet of addresses is saved in my Minted account for future use making next year's card making process even faster! 


In addition to my regular Christmas cards I also ordered ornament cards to include on gifts. I decided to go with a different design for these and chose "Be Joyful" by Snow and Ivy. Once again, the flexibility of the design saved the day. In the standard layout the text is at the bottom of the ornament. I really needed it to fill that big gap at the top between the kids, so with a few clicks of the mouse I moved it to the perfect location. These are going to look great tied on gifts as well as hanging on the tree. 


I am so happy with how our Christmas cards came out this year. The print quality and paper is perfect. The turn around time was super fast and everything came packaged securely.

Ok, now to go take these babies to the post office...

Thanks Minted!

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