David Turner has picked a holiday card design winner, and it’s Annie Clark and her design “Vintage Peppermint”, pictured at left. Annie will receive the special $1,000 judge’s award in the “Our First Holiday Card” Freshly Minted Design Challenge, and her design will be available for sale at Minted shortly. (To read more about David, please visit our judge’s page. Click here to see his work.). Congrats, Annie!

David explains why he chose Annie’s design, and has some great insight for the Minted community overall:

“I chose this design because it was the one I would buy myself. What Annie seems to understand is that people are sending a photo to family and friends and the job of the design is to make the photo look better not to overpower it.

Her design is nostalgic, which is appropriate given the subject, but not sentimental. Her font choice is dead on. She’s avoided all the usual clichés but her color choice makes the card feel seasonal. It would work with almost any photo. Even a terrible photo can look OK in black and white.

It does, however, have an Achilles’ heel which it shares with many of the other designs. What if the couple’s names are longer? They won’t fit.

The key to these template type designs is versatility. Many of the designs looked pretty good but only because they used a color palette based on the photo. Put a different photo in the template and the design would fall apart.

One obvious piece of advice is, if it’s a holiday card, it should look like one. Here I would apply Raymond Loewy’s MAYA principle (Most Advanced Yet Acceptable). You can be innovative, but your design must connect to people’s feelings about the holiday season. Being deliberately ‘un-holiday’ as one designer put it isn’t innovative, it’s just irrelevant. A car without wheels is very ‘un-car’ but it’s not much use to anyone.

Finally, nearly all of the designers focused entirely on the look of the card. The question we always ask is ‘What’s the idea?’ A good idea can be described in words, or a thumbnail sketch, without the help of colors, fonts, textures, etc. Once you have a good idea, you can make it look great.

OK, I’ll get off my soapbox now! This was fun. Give my congratulations to Annie.”