Designing Postcards for Holidays, Businesses, and Events

Written by Design, Printing

Custom printed postcards are great for giving out during holidays

It’s officially the holiday season! And while there’s still some time before the new year, it’s time to start thinking about some ways to show your appreciation or thanks to the people around you. There’s no better way to show your support to your friends, colleagues, clients, and other important people in your life who have shown support for you than with postcards! 

If you thought postcards were irrelevant forms of communication in the digital age, think again! Not only can postcards be really beautiful, but they make the most use of their available space with a great combination of text and images.

You can store them in your wallet, stick it on to a refrigerator, or put it anywhere else you want to cherish it. Even if you just leave it around on a table or your desk at work, people will stop to appreciate the beauty and elegance of the postcard, rather than pointing out if it’s out of place!

Postcards don’t have to be so personal, either. A postcard shows someone your message in a fun way. Use postcards for your business to promote something new, an event, product, or just to send someone a nice sentiment. The possibilities of what you can do with a postcard are endless!

What to Use Postcards For

Postcard promoting traveling agency

Postcards have a wide variety of uses. If you run a business, it’s an amazing form of customer relationship management. Giving out postcards to your customers, clients, or other people contributing to your business will create more interaction between your business and your audiences.

In the end, you’ll have higher customer satisfaction, customer retention, and a better perception of your brand by your customers! Just make sure you avoid these mistakes. After all, your business is counting on it!

You can also use postcards to advertise your sales, new products, or a fun message from your business! Postcards are great for Black Friday sales, holiday greetings, or to showcase your newest collections and arrivals. Non-profit organizations can use them to increase support for their cause. Make the most use of your postcards to create more exposure for your business or organization!

Promote an event using a custom printed postcard just for that event! Since postcards are known for their small size, you can easily hand them out in large, crowded areas to give your event more attention. In the end, you’ll have a greater attendance rate and people will be excited to go to your future events! All that just from handing out a postcard.

Designing Your Postcard

Print double sided postcards or single sided postcards

A traditional postcard has a graphic on both sides, but the front of the postcard is usually more detailed than the backside. However, you don’t have to make it a traditional postcard! Make a postcard that matches your aesthetics, or the aesthetics of your business or event. There’s no wrong way to make a postcard!

Postcard Safe Area

Postcards design template with safe area, trim box, and bleeds

The important thing to look out for when making your postcard is to determine if your postcard’s graphics will fit into the safe area of the postcard. The safe area is the parts of your file that will be printed without any chance of it getting cut out, or not reaching the borders of the postcard.

It’s extremely crucial to put the most important content of your design in the safe area only. This includes your images, your logo, dates or names written in the design, and other elements that you want people to see. If they get cut off, your customers, clients, guests, visitors, or other people in your target audience will get incomplete information!

Postcard Trim Box and Bleed Area

Another reason why it’s so important to have a safe area in a postcard is that there are two other elements in printing the postcard called bleeds and the trim box. The trim box is the final size of the printed postcard, and the bleed area is where the printer may not print the borders of your postcard. 

When printing out your postcards, a printer may not recognize if the borders of your postcard are completely full with content. If a printer does can’t identify the borders of your design, it will recognize the borders as blank space. This will result in the printer printing the final product of the postcard with white borders! That’s probably not the kind of postcard you would want to give to others.

To avoid having a mess of a postcard with white borders, you need to create your design with borders that match the design of the postcard. A border doesn’t have to be solid lines around your design. You can stretch your design so that it extends to the bleed area of your design, as long as there are no important design elements in your bleed area. 

As long as you don’t leave the bleed area empty,  you can be confident that there will be no blank spaces on your postcard. Expect your postcards printed in excellent quality and just the way you want it!

Mix It Up

Holiday design for personalized postcards and brochures

Postcards are very effective forms of marketing, advertising, and general communication! Use postcards to promote a business or event right in time for the holidays, but also be sure to combine postcards with other forms of marketing materials to give your marketing campaigns an extra boost!

Brochures are very impressive when it comes to raising awareness for something, especially for non-profit organizations. Make your brochures interesting and unique so you get more people picking them up and checking out what you have to offer! For design tips on how to make your brochure and finding out what kind of brochure is right for you, check out our article on designing a brochure!

At Printleaf, we work with professionals in New York City. Our mission is to make your events, businesses, and offices look their best and attract more customers and clients. Looking to get custom printed postcards for a business or event in NYC? Come visit us in Midtown. We work with many local and national businesses so they get their holiday material fast and easily!

Last modified: January 31, 2020

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