Feasibility of Printing Your Own Christmas Card
Commercial printers produce various cards containing numerous graphics and associated wordings for Christmas year on year. This year, let’s make it a point to be indigenous and produce our own Christmas cards, customized to our liking and personalized to the near and dear recipient.
We need to have an inkjet printer which can handle cards, and preferably a printer that has a paper path that doesn’t involve turning of sheets. Laser printers that print in colour and the one that fits the bill with the card feeder will also be a good alternative. If we have a printer that turns the paper by 180 degrees, we will need to employ a special kind of card that doesn’t curl nor bend upon turning.
To design a card, we need some DTP software that contains templates for creating cards for all occasions. Some of the popular DTP programs include MS Publisher, InDesign, PagePlus among several others. Some inkjet printers come with proprietary DTP software which may very well be employed.
TR has published a tutorial for designing cards using Serif’s PagePlus which is one of the leading DTP software, and is widely used by professionals today. The process defined for creating a card involves minimal graphic skills and can be completed on the fly.
Now, for the most important part of any discussion, the price!!! If we are printing our own cards, chances are good that the price of each card that we produce may turn out to be more expensive than the ones available in the market. This is due to the sheer volumes of cards the printers produce that helps them reduce their costs, and hence would be a cheaper alternative to producing our own cards. TR estimates that the price of each card might fall between 75p and £1.
About the author:
Abhinav has been blogging about printing and related technologies on CreativeCloud for several years. He is also a project manager for a large technology company.
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