Sharing my free hand lettered ‘merry happy’ design for your photo christmas cards plus how to add gold foil to holiday card designs on Mixbook!
This post is sponsored by Mixbook, as always- I only promote products I totally love. Find my full disclosure here.
Every year I have so much fun making our family’s holiday cards and while I totally love being able to letter the designs that we print… I don’t want to miss out on all the fun stuff like ROSE GOLD FOIL and rounded corners. I’m sorry, did I say that loud enough? You can get rose gold foil on cards now, you guys! So today I wanted to share with you our holiday cards that we created in partnership with Mixbook using one of their pre-made designs PLUS how you can add any design you want (or make!) to a pre-made template like any of the real foil ones #swoon. As always- I’m sharing my lettering file with you if you’d like to use it (grab it by scrolling down).
Don’t want to design your card in a software like this? I shared how to make your own with overlays like this in free online software RIGHT HERE. AND if you’d rather make it in Photoshop- I share a tutorial for that RIGHT HERE. This tutorial here has the benefit of GOLD FOIL though!
The first thing you’ll want to do is pick a photo for your card THEN find a design that you love. I made a vertical one a few years ago and kicked myself because all our fave family photos were horizontal. So I spent a ton of time emailing back and forth with my photographer having her crop shots different ways. Never again! These jammie photos are from an exciting project we worked on that we will be announcing next week but they were too fun not to use for our holiday cards (photographed by the incredible Scarlet O’Neil).
Once you know horizontal or vertical… time to look for a design! There’s tons of card companies out there, but after having photo books printed with Mixbook earlier this year, I was so happy with their quality and printing that I knew they were who I wanted to have ours printed with. I’m going to use screenshots from the design process on their site to help explain and make it ridiculously easy to follow along as I’m going through.
This technique will totally work with ANY of the cards. But because the foil is so beautiful, I’m going to focus on that :) If you want to add your own lettering or design (or my Merry Happy lettering), you want to look for a pre-made template that has a foiled design not foiled phrases. So snowflakes, frames, doodles… all awesome! A foiled ‘Merry Christmas’ you can’t swap out for your phrase. The foiled part of the design won’t change- just the rest will, if that makes sense. I settled on this gorgeous Holiday Pine Frame card but I played with a couple others as well. I would definitely play with a few to figure out what works with the blank space in your photo!
BEFORE you start editing your design- make sure you pick which color of foil you want. Mixbook has the option of gold, rose gold, or silver. If you’re not crazy about the image placement or the fonts or something else like that… know that it’s totally customizable- at this point just look at the foil details. You’ll notice that mine has different fonts, text, and the back isn’t a full page photo like the example here. I love a good editor!
Once you hit ‘personalize’, this is how it opens up and you can upload all the images you’d like to use in your design. Or play with to see which ones work best! I have uploaded both the front photo, reverse photo, and the Merry Happy overlay (white, so it’s hard to see in the sidebar there). Any overlay you upload MUST have a translucent background (.png) and MUST be in the color you want it (in this case, white).
Just drag your image over the design and drop it. It will automatically snap to the template- which was a full page photo for this design. You can see I also deleted the ‘Merry Christmas’ text. Just click the textbox and hit delete. Then, to get your overlay on there (this is the trickiest part, promise)… you need to trick it. If you drag and drop it on top of your image, it will swap out your image for the overlay… which isn’t what we want. You want it to add as an additional image, so drag your main photo off to the side a bit and drop your overlay image on the white space as shown. You can then shift everything back around and resize it if you like.
If you’d like to use my hand lettered ‘merry happy’ design- I’d be flattered! I will send it directly to your inbox. As always, freebies are for personal use only AND I would totally love to see what you design using it ;)
Drag everything around until you like it (I did some resizing made sure the rose gold foil was ON TOP of my hand lettered overlay) then made sure it was all centred using their guidelines. Then, you can edit text! We changed it to our names, then I switched to a really clean, classic all caps font. I love how this balances the playful hand lettering. Since I made these cards, Mixbook has added in an additional 100 (yes 100!) fonts to their editor, so I’m sure you’ll find something you love. If your design doesn’t have a text box there already, you can just hit the ‘add text’ button on the top of the editor.
Time to take on the reverse! You could just drop your photo in this full image design, then resize it… or you can delete this and start from scratch. Just drag and drop your image onto the white background and size it accordingly. I also played with having a round image here. You can change any image into a shape by clicking the image, then selecting edit, then shape.
I finished the back of the card off with some text and added a sticker overlay that was already loaded into Mixbook (stickers are in the left, just a different tab than your images). If you wanted to add your own sticker- like a hand lettered 2017 or something, you could do that the exact same way as you did the ‘Merry Happy’ on the front.
That’s it! It really is so simple to add your own lettering or design. I’m so in love with how these turned out and the foil is just so darn beautiful. I tried to capture how well it shines, but the photos don’t even do it justice.
I hope you found this tutorial helpful! If you do end up using my design or even the tutorial in general- I’d so love to see what you create!
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