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Christmas Cards

It’s that time of year. Time to mass-produce sensitive and personal messages of Good Cheer to people you’ve never met.

Let’s get down to it.

We have on hand a stock of cards deemed suitable for our purpose. The inside of the card has one face empty and the other with a centralized block of text.

Our aim is to fill all the available empty space on the inside with a newsy message of what-we’ve-done-this-year and I hope-your-year-was-just-as-good and next-year-will-be-better.

We outline the central block and find with its white-space border it measures 9cm wide by 5cm deep.

Since the panel (this half of the card) measures 15.2 cm by 10.2 cm, that means we have borders 3.1cm each side of the central block and and 2.6cm above and below the central block.

Our plan is to build a Microsoft Word document the size of the inside of the card – 15.2x20.4 – and populate it with an image 9x5 and make the text wrap around that image.

Since the pre-printed greeting is laid out, we will want our text to be aligned the same way, so we will start with a regular letter-sized document in portrait mode and re-size it down from 21.59x27.94 to be 15.2x20.4 – the physical size of the card when opened up for reading.

We would like margins of 1cm all around the edge of the card.

Here, for what it’s worth, is an image 9x5. The image is temporarily colored pale blue so that we can see it placed in the greeting card.

Next: Laying Out the Card

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