How to Make your Greeting Card Design and Card Printing Process Faster and Better

If you plan in doing some serious greeting card printing, you should very well learn the basics on how to print and design your own custom greeting cards faster and better. Let me help you to do this by teaching you 7 basic tips that will improve your greeting card design and card printing process. These tips should make these processes faster, better and more precise.

1. Work with software you are comfortable with – One of the important key things for a smoother and faster time in designing your custom greeting cards is the software you are working with. It is important that you use a software that you are comfortable with and have some basic knowledge to operate. Knowledge and skill about a certain software application goes a long way in creating designs. You’ll be able to invoke commands faster and manipulate design elements better if you are comfortable with the software. So use the software that you like the most, or try to learn an application that you think you would like.



2. Use templates and create templates – Greeting card templates are great tools to make your design process faster. By downloading professional templates, or creating your own templates from scratch, you can easily build up your own custom greeting card designs much quicker. With greeting card templates, all you have to do is to load them up and then start designing. You do not need to do all the other mundane stuff of setting up the dimensions, layout areas, guidelines and printing bleeds. Everything has already been pre-set to help you out. This can cut your design time by as much 10-20%. So try to use templates when possible.



3. Learn to use pre-set styles – Software applications sometimes do have pre-set design styles you can use for your greeting cards. For example, Microsoft Publisher has certain text styles you can immediately apply for the text of your color greeting cards. Adobe Photos hop also has pre-set image styles for image layers so that you can apply blending options and filter elements all in one click. These pre-set styles save you a lot of time in adding and fine tuning special effects to your design elements for greeting cards. Use them a lot and you will save a lot of time and make work a lot easier.



4. Know the big design shortcuts – Another good tip for better and quicker times in designing custom greeting cards is to know the big design shortcuts. For example, did you know that you can select multiple layers in Adobe Photoshop and apply effects and styles en masse to all of them? This kind of move saves you a lot of time in editing different layers. There are a lot of tricks like this that will save you time and effort in creating your greeting card designs. So read up and know these tricks.



5. Know the common keyboard shortcuts – Besides design tricks, you might also be interested to kno w that keyboard shortcuts can also help make your design process faster. You might not realize it, but it is faster to use a keyboard shortcut than use a mouse to invoke the command. So try to know the keyboard shortcuts of your most used formatting commands. Use them and you’ll be designing things faster for your color greeting cards.



6. Prepare everything before designing – Now, here is a good practice to do in most of your design processes for greeting cards. You should try to prepare everything before starting the design process. By preparing all the text and images perfectly before doing the layout, you minimize distractions and other deviations from focus when you do your layouts. All you need to do is move around your design elements and format them. No need to recompose text, or re-crop images. With everything prepared, the process will run more smoothly.



7. Talk to the printer before printing – Finally, you should try to talk to the printer before you print greeting cards. Sometimes people forget that it is important to know what the printer expects and any concerns they have in greeting card printing. By knowing the greeting card printer requirements and specifications, you can minimize conversion errors and miscommunication in greeting card printing. This saves you a lot of time since there will be less chances of errors or mistakes.



So that is how you make the greeting card printing process faster and easier for you.