Press For the Agency

Time to Start Planning

This article is courtesy of Desktop Magazine (download the original).

 

Jack Yan says that greeting cards need not be stuck in the 1940s, as a bunch of Canadian designers have demonstrated.

You may be thinking that it's the beginning of the year, Easter is the next big holiday and that we shouldn't even give Christmas another thought. But it may be worth giving it a moment of your time before it creeps up on you, again.

 

These past holidays saw the usual corporate greetings, which bored the heck out of me. Most companies invest in the generic, signed-by-all-members of their team, with little imagination given to enhance their brands. Instead, we are treated to the usual images of Christmas trees and snowy scenes for the most part — hardly relevant to an Antipodean. In some cases, hands are tied due to political correctness: Santa Claus might find himself offending some parties, or so the PC movement believes.

 

But what is more disturbing is the typography. Of the cards I received these past holidays, only four reflected the corporate look of their senders, and they weren't necessarily pulled off well. Peugeot used Gill Sans, tying it into campaigns Down Under, but took the opportunity to plug the 307. Dermalogica and Revlon put their logos on the cover, decorated mildly with Christmas icons, but hardly expressing what they are about. In most other cases, the holiday greeting was an opportunity missed.

 

I imagine the missed opportunity is due to late planning, but why the departure from typographic standards? It's a mystery. Type is the best way to tie a holiday greeting back to the corporate philosophy; its mere presence can prevent a card from becoming a cheeky advertisement.

 

I mentioned three cases earlier. The fourth was from Designer Clothing Gallery, a small boutique in Wellington, which kept away from type other than on the reverse of the card, displaying its logo and the charity
— CatWalk Trust — that it supports. Designer Clothing Gallery showed that you don't need a big budget to make a holiday greeting send out the right message about your business.

 

None of these, however, fitted the bill better than a pack of cards from SmashLab, a Vancouver design firm that mailed me a bunch of blank ones out of the blue, a few weeks before Christmas 2006. I am not even sure it it was meant to be a holiday greeting (none of the cards had any overt holiday message; only the timing suggested otherwise), but through clever typography and graphic design, I began to understand SmashLab. The creativeness meant that I overlooked the tact that it was a bunch of designers probably trying to market their services to me. The cards themselves didn't always follow SmashLab's adherence to Helvetica, but the introductory wrapping did.
The rest of the typography and design — clean, modernist — told me that Smash lab understood a certain style.

 

The sum of it told me that Smash Lab has plenty of competences, from copywriting to clean design to good printing.

 

It also suggested that SmashLab had thought about the raison d'CJre of the greeting card.

 

The message in the introduction, a card wrapping the eight cards, was very mid-decade and a recognition that the e-greeting had gone too far. "We send 171 billion emails a day...," it began. "These days, phrases like: TOL', `M$ULkeCrZ', `MTFBWU -/-/SOX, :-()' are becoming increasingly commonplace. (This seems really frickin' weird to us.)

 

"...We're of the mind that most messages are disposable. By nature of what we do, we often wonder how this can be changed. Wouldn't it be nicer if things felt more personal, meaningful and real?

 

"Enclosed are eight cards: just paper with ink on them. The promise they hold, however, is greater: an opportunity to truly connect with someone. Here are a few suggestions to get the ball rolling". There is then a list of ways cards could be used, almost a primer on greeting card usage for an e-generation that may have forgotten.

 

I am sure SmashLab hopes that I would use each card, sending them out to our clients. I didn't: I opted to talk about them here, reminding readers not just to get cards ready for 2007, but that there are plenty of ways to get a firm noticed. But I did go to their website, finding out more and remembering that I did have some connection with them through the 'Ideas on Ideas' blog.

 

I admit I encourage the sending of personal, rather than corporate, cards. Indeed, the only ones I save are those that have a personal message. Each 5 January, the corporate, insincere ones - the ones with 'Dear' already printed on them and 'Jack' filled in afterwards - go into the recycling bin. (Television New Zealand, take note.)

 

Yet the majority of those personal cards have designs that go back to when Hallmark was founded, with the very irrelevant images that I wrote about. They say nothing about my firm, but I don't want them to. I expect the cards to be read by my friends, not by people I have to send them to by virtue of a client/supplier relationship.

 

The last innovative cards at a company level that I did for us were the usual Hallmark-style ones bought off the shelf, with an extra sheet inside, saddle-stapled, that contained the corporate greeting. The idea: rip out the middle and use the rest of the card for the following year. You could even send it back to us.
That was our effort at being environmentally friendly before the age of emailed cards.

 

We didn't help the cause of better design or typography much with those efforts. And we're unlikely to get away from the traditional, since most Christmas cards come from Red China these days, printed as commodity items flooding any country with Christian roots and the English language.

 

Yet that traditional design does bug me, especially after being reminded of what is possible.

 

They have, after all, been around since 1843. Henry Cole commissioned an artist, John Calcott Horsley, to design a standard card, using religious symbolism. By the end of the century, the religious aspect disappeared. In the US, Hallmark's first cards began observing Christmas trends in the 1920s, with greater growth in the 1940s due to World War II.

 

Despite dabbling with humour and psychedelia, the majority of cards have been stuck in the 1940s look, with Hallmark blaming the resurgence of the style on a 'new traditionalism' - an interest in family and home life in the 1990s.

 

I think the company may be off the mark, because the idea of cutting down trees, or at least recycling paper into cards, needs great design before old customs are observed again. And flowery script or, even worse, ITC Zapf Chancery Italic, will send a recipient to sleep.

 

SmashLab has one card with a game of Tic Tac Toe already begun, with a single cross in the top left-hand corner. In the bottom right (since we are talking modernist design) are two words: "your turn", in the (now) little-seen ITC Bookman Bold.

 

Others offer more relevant 21st century greetings: "i hope you have a venti, soy, chai, double-shot, extra foam kind of day. know what i mean?" [sic], "i won't give you a computer virus if you open me" [sic], and "This card is recycled, which means that in a previous life it may have been a porno magazine. Does that make you feel dirty?"

 

So now what?

 

Now, I need to think whether it's worthwhile to get back into the corporate card game for 2007. Jack Yan & Associates has been through its share of changes over the past few years, and holiday cards have been the last thing on our minds.

If I were to do it, I'd need to start with our typographic palette. Greeting cards are not the place to do the hard sell, because 21st century consumers will just turn off. Instead, use the typefaces you've always used for company collateral.

 

Secondly, decide on the style: don't depart from what you've typically offered, but extend it. I am not even sure if the cards need to be overtly holiday season. SmashLab's timing was sufficient, and that means these cards can be printed any time. In fact, they could double as get well or birthday cards - saving an organisation potential money.

 

You might not need your logo on it then, because everything
will tie in to what you stand for. Your own name(s) will be sufficient to connect your organisation with the recipient. It will seem more sincere, and sincerity is a very marketable commodity - since it is in short supply in business.

 

I have to hand it to SmashLab for this little retro touch in 2006. And, in 2007, I'd love to see more of these quirky approaches. While emailed greetings are fine, and often creative, and they save a lot of trees, there is still nothing like getting a wee item through the post.

Jack Yan is CEO of Jack Yan & Associates (www.jya.net) and the publisher of Lucire (www.lucire.com).