Card Series:

Initial thoughts

Last year, I made use of a generative macchine learning model that made super cool art, but itdidn’t feel like I personally was making something for friends and family. More like Iwas pushing a button for them. This year, though I was quite busy with work, I wanted the art to actually be something I designed, not so difficult to make, but still different for every recipient. And also interesting. And also roughly on time. Surely that would be possible!

A thought I’ve had for a while

One idea that had come up for the past two years was making use of a neat tool called vpype-pixelart that can facilitate printing pixel art using a 2-D pen plotter like the axidraw we have. I wasn’t sure exactly what the art should be, but for the past two years I have thought about making fireworks of some kind. I’ve always thought that video game fireworks were pretty neat.

I tested using this tool during the year to make a few other cards. One of which is this Pikachu.

To test the idea of fireworks, I drew fireworks using pixelart.com and made the following elaborate firework.

Customizablilty

Now that I had a proof of concept in hand, I wanted make it complicated. How cool would it be to randomly generate unique fireworks for every card!? I saw a neat video about the Computer Fireworks Celebration Kit on the Commodore 64, and thought it must be possible to do that sort of thing. Then life got in the way and I ran out of time and energy to program something like that. Instead, I opted to make a few different varieties of fireworks big and small, and combine them differently to make each card unique.

To make them, I started with pictures of existing pixel fireworks from the internet and traced over them, but I found that exactly tracing an existing design didn’t look great, so I used the pictures more as inspiration and made my own designs on top of them.

Big fireworks

Little fireworks

Fonts

To add to the uniqueness and the pixel art vibe, I wanted to use pixel text for the Happy New Year message. At first, I looked for pixel art text generators and tried designingmy own font before realizinng that I could use the same technique I was using for the fireworks! I could find existing interesting pixel fonts, and just trace over them pixel srt style. That took a bit of time, but was very successful.

Printing

We continue to make great use of the Axidraw and used that along with some bright (and sometimes metallic) gel pens to print the fireworks. Each page took 45-55 minutes to print.

Then we used the axidraw to write the insides of the cards as usual.

Assembly

Like last year, I printed everything seperately, cut slots in the corners of the cards, and assembled all the pieces. After a few long hours of cutting and assembling (while watching the Big Fat Quiz of the Year and of Everything), they were ready to go!

An animation showing several card faces, each with the words Happy New Year and a different large firework in the middle with two smaller fireworks on either side.
A small sample of possible card designs.

Supplies

Thanks to projects we’ve made in the past, everything used (except the gel pens) was left over from past projects.

In the end, we used the following supplies to make this year’s cards:

  • 100lb (270g/m^2) 12x18 inch Neenah Smooth Digital cover paper
  • Fabriano black paper
  • Affinity Designer/Photo for making the pixel art (make sure to turn off dithering!)
  • GellyRoll moonlight gel pens for the art on the front
  • Zebra SARASA 0.5mm pens (for writing the cards and drawing art on the inside)
  • custom 3D printed corner cutting guide (view in Tinkercad)
  • custom 3D printed scoring board (view in Tinkercad)
  • embossing tool for scoring the cards
  • various cutting tools including a double sided Exacto knife
  • a desktop guillotine for cutting the cards

Lessons learned

It feels better to actually make it

Designing and making them myself felt so much better than clicking a button repeatedly last year.

More composability is worth it

This year, I didn’t print the art directly on the card, I printed it on smaller pagers, cut those out, and inserted the final results into the cards. This really helps with when things go wrong. I don’t need to remake the entire card, I just just remake the art on the front!

Don’t cut by hand

I really should have bought a paper cutting guillotine much sooner. It made cutting so much faster and cleaner.