Christmas Card 2008

I posted this earlier in the year for some reason and it's buried somewhere in the archives, so since this is Christmas card week, I'm dredging it up again.

The idea of the card was to make it look like an old-time boxing poster from the 1920s, starring Santa Claus and his made-up rival, Anti Claus. Nothing says Christmas like a card promoting two characters beating the tar out of one another!

I laid out the card and all the copy in InDesign, because I don't like working with large amounts of text in Photoshop. It's much easier to typeset and adjust text in InDesign. Writing the old timey text was fun; trying to match the archaic hyphenation and phrasing of the past.

I then imported everything into Photoshop, where I drew and colored the characters on the graphic tablet, and added some aging effects.

I guess the aging effects were successful-- I sent a card to my boss and when he saw it he thought his wife had bent the top right corner of the card when taking it out of the envelope!

Also, after I had all the cards conveniently mailed away, I noticed to my horror that I'd forgotten to add "VS" between Santa Claus and Anti Claus. A boxing poster kind of needs to say that. I added the "VS" later on, so if you received one of the original mailings, you've got a rare collector's item, just like that one stamp with the upside-down airplane that's worth a couple million dollars.

I'm still not happy with the fact that Anti Claus is brandishing a crowbar. Originally I was going to have him holding a large candy cane as a club. That was definitely Christmassy, but it didn't seem very dangerous, and it just didn't read as a weapon. It looked like he really enjoyed candy canes. In the end I couldn't think of a better weapon, so I reluctantly had to go with crowbar.