The Story of an E Card

Among the many crazy things our team does, designing birthday cards is the biggest brain teaser.
So the big challenge here, is to develop a birthday gif file of a colleague. The bigger challenge is to come up with a novel idea for all the 130 (and growing) employees, every year. And the biggest challenge is, to email the `final’ output within an hour.



Designing an e birthday card with pictures of our colleagues had no direct ROI. But we still love doing it. The brightest reason being, its nice to cheer someone on his / her birthday. Putting it in the lingo of Organizational behavior, `It helps to boost employee morale’.
But from the `Content Solutions’ perspective, e card design is a valuable brain teasing exercise. We have to come up with a quick and impressive unique idea and a card. What colors to choose, what is the story, searching for the exact pictures… all in the luxury of one hour.
And the reward? `Good job’ mails, a thank you mail from the birthday boy/ girl, and most importantly, the satisfaction of displaying a creative extravaganza. (O Yes, the birthday treat is an inevitable pleasure!)

Last week, our team got a good volume of applause for designing an e card. There are days where we have spent hours and hours on the design. But with this one, all we took was half an hour. But the `wow’ factor was for the novelty of the idea.


So I thought I will share this with you all, and how we made the card.



The design is of course inspired from Google. In order to emulate the Google page, we took a screenshot of a typical Google search, and re built the `personalized elements’ in Power point. Having the exact fonts and structure did the trick.



Lastly, we take a screenshot of all the slides and convert it into a gif output using Adobe Image Ready.