mystylex.techinfus.com/en/ has repeatedly published collections of vintage New Year cards in various styles and from different parts of the world. We had articles “Vintage New Year's photos and postcards of the 1920s”, “Pre-revolutionary New Year cards" etc. Today we will show and tell you how in just 10-20 minutes you can make a real name card yourself, say, in the style of the late 19th century.

Let's make a reservation right away that for this:

• no need to be able to draw;
  
• no need to understand graphic design;
  
• no need to buy anything;
  

In doing so, you have the opportunity to truly surprise someone. Firstly, old postcards are exclusively either museum exhibits or lots at auctions. As they wrote in the press a couple of years ago, one card from the remaining circulation of the world's first Christmas card was sold for 25 thousand euros. Secondly, no matter how beautiful the purchased postcard is, not always and not everyone succeeds in writing something truly touching. The result is just a pretty image with text on the back.

It's another matter when even the front side of the postcard addresses directly to the recipient. It's not clear how or why, but you know for sure that this is the only postcard of its kind in the world, and it is exclusively for you. Completely different emotions. And if it also looks like it was printed a century and a half ago, it will definitely not become another piece of cardboard.

For our ideas, we will use the graphic editor Canva, in which all the tools and graphic libraries we need are available completely free of charge. In the Pro version, of course, there are dozens of times more graphics, but we will use the basic free version. How simple it is, you will see for yourself in the course of this article.

Let's start with the postcard backing as it is the lightest and most versatile part. With her, half the battle will be done.



How to do it? Open the “Photos” tab, select only free images in the filter, write “vintage postcard” in the search bar. We see various options that can be used in any way for non-commercial purposes, including in its original form. If you wish, you can just leave the background as it looks natural, and do everything else in your own way (we look for shapes and lines in the “Elements” tab, select the old font in the list of fonts when editing). The example above is the reverse side of an old German postcard. We removed only a couple of fragments from it to make it look cleaner. You can also just take any image of a piece of paper from the library (tab “Photos”, search for “paper”) and use it as a background.



Now you can deal with the face of the future card. Since we are making an antique postcard, we need to search for suitable elements of the composition in the tabs “Photos” and “Elements”, using the words “vintage”, “illustration”, “drawing” and the like in the search. You can already add clarifications to them, for example, “vintage christmas”, “illustration winter”, “drawing winter”.

The easiest option is, of course, a combination of a ready-made drawing and an old-fashioned font. In fact, there is practically nothing to do here.



Ultimate Scandinavian Minimalism:




Now you can complicate the task a little and use not a ready-made illustration, but make your own. Can't you draw? As we said, this is completely unnecessary. We will simply put together the intended composition as a constructor.



Find the necessary vintage illustration, insert, duplicate, reduce, enlarge, rotate, if necessary - done. It turns out completely the author's composition.

What about Soviet-style New Year's postcards? As in the second case, we will construct an authentic New Year's story from separately taken elements. Only this time we will change the design on the back.



To make such a turn, you need one solid line and a square in the form of dots (for the index).



If you want to design a personalized Christmas card in the Western style of the end of the last century, you just need to find a template that suits the style and just choose a beautiful font. In this finished layout, we just removed a few elements to make room for the text (Bellaboo font). No other changes were required.



Now let's turn this card into an authentic vintage postcard, for example, in a Mexican style. To do this, in the "Elements" tab, write "Mexican Christmas" and replace the existing elements with Mexican ones. These are traditional dishes, drinks, decorative elements - each element has a description and a list of keywords, by which you can always find out what exactly is shown in the picture. The congratulation itself, of course, we write in Spanish.



The same principle can be used to make vintage postcards in the French, Brazilian, Japanese style, etc. Depends on your imagination and preferences of the conventional Anna, to whom we addressed the postcards in this article.

And finally, two useful life hacks:

• if in the process of creating a card you have doubts about the compatibility of colors, use the palette selection tools;
  
• to work only with free fonts, of which there are several hundred in Canva, just type “free” in the font search bar, for Cyrillic fonts - “free Cyrillic”.
  

Happy experiments!