How We Design Our Greeting Cards

We love capturing cozy cafe scenes and nostalgic images on the Oregon coast. But our second favorite part of running a greeting card company is the design process.

No matter how many times we go through the process, it never gets old. And even if we think we’ll know what an image will look like as a card, it always looks slightly different than we thought it would. (It’s always better!)

We can print 10 cards at a time, so the first step is to figure out how many of our current designs we need to reprint. It’s usually three or four So we often come up with six or seven new designs at a time.

The next step is to decide what kind of occasion each new design will celebrate: birthday cards, sympathy cards, love cards, retirement cards...we look at sales, upcoming holidays, and our current stock to choose the occasions we think our customers want most. 

Then Jacquie and Sarah each look through the Stonehenge photo archive and choose the images we think match each occasion the best. Then we get together, compare, narrow it down, and decide on the final images. 

Once we know which images we’re using, we start the search for the perfect quote to pair with each image. Again, we go to our archive—we have resources that include thousands of quotes we’ve gathered over the years. 

Once they’re paired, we choose a name for each card (a deceptively tricky task) and move on to the editing process.

Using Photoshop, we correct the color and exposure, figure out just the right cropping for the front image, back thumbnail image, and the bookmark, and place the quote and greeting. Voila!

After we send our files to the printer, they send back proofs. We check them each for errors, again and again. This is where we make quadruple sure there are no spelling errors, typos, outright mistakes, or random spacing. Then we take a deep breath and give our final approval.

(Printing day is its own thing; we’ll walk you through that another time.)

As a two-person business, we love that we have complete creative control over our whole process and we’re proud that we do every bit of it ourselves. (No stock images or tired internet templates here—everything is done in-house by the two of us.)

We hope you love our products—all 300+ of them—as much as we do! Peruse our collections often—we’re always adding more greeting card designs for you to send to the people you care about.