How to Design a Postcard that Transforms into a Picture Frame

[Treehouse presents] 0:00 [Exercise Your Creative] 0:04 Hey, what's up? Mat Helme here with another exciting episode of EYC. 0:08 In this epidsode, we're going to be taking a look at the process 0:12 of creating a custom postcard for Treehouse. 0:15 The project objective was to create a custom postcard which has an interchangeable badge 0:18 on the back of each postcard as well as an area for a hand-written message. 0:23 I was given this task by the User Growth team here at Treehouse. 0:28 I really love designing for these guys, because they always allow me 0:32 to push the envelope when it comes to creativity. 0:36 My thought going into the project was this: 0:39 I knew right off the bat I wanted to make this project letterpressed. 0:41 Reason being, any card or item that's letterpressed always adds value to it. 0:46 Also I wanted to make this piece appear old-fashioned, almost antique-like. 0:51 Maybe give it a wooden texture somehow. 0:56 Now, when they told me we needed to make a postcard, 0:58 I knew we needed to give it another purpose. 1:00 The reason being is this: Whenever you get a postcard in the mail, 1:03 you do 1 of 2 things. 1:07 1, you hang it on the fridge, or second, you'll throw it in a pile of paper. 1:09 So I knew we had to have another purpose for this. 1:13 This is when it hit me: Let's create a custom postcard 1:16 that turns into a picture frame of Mike the Frog at Treehouse. 1:19 This way, they can put it on their desk, and it won't be lost in a pile of paper somewhere. 1:22 Now, I know I can create that wooden frame and give it that antique look. 1:27 So first I head to the web, and I grab as many pictures and ideas as possible. 1:32 I want to keep in mind, I want these 3 things: I want old, I want brown, and I want wood. 1:36 Also, I went and got samples from Mama's Sauce. 1:40 Now, Mama's Sauce is 1 of my favorite hand-craft printers. 1:43 These guys are like the best-kept secret in the hand-craft printing industry. 1:46 Reason being, there's no guidelines. 1:50 There's no downloaded template, and put your graphics in. 1:52 So after gathering all of my inspirational pieces from the web, 1:56 I went ahead and dumped them into Photoshop 1:58 and created six 8½ x 11 layouts that I would then print and glue on foamboard. 2:01 This way I'm not printing out every picture, hand cutting each 1 of them, 2:09 and then placing them on the mood board. 2:13 It would just take longer; this is just a faster way to do it. 2:15 [?Slow keyboard music playing?] 2:18 Then I fastened it to the wall in front of the sketching desk 3:00 and added any other print pieces I had on hand to use as inspiration. 3:03 Our next step is mocking up the postcards. 3:07 The tools I used for this were construction paper, 3:09 marker, glue, cutting board, and Exacto blade. 3:12 I wanted to create this mockup for a number of reasons. 3:16 1, to see if we could actually make it work. 3:18 Second, to make sure the team was on the same page as me as far as the design goes. 3:21 And third, to see how much this would actually cost. 3:25 So I went ahead and made a quick mockup by simply cutting the construction paper out 3:28 and placing the content that's needed on the back 3:32 and making a quick illustration on the front just to pitch my idea, and they loved it. 3:37 So now we're ready to move forward. 3:41 The next step is sketching. The tools I used for this were: 3:43 a pencil, a piece of paper, and the environment that I had created 3:46 with the mood board I had hung up. 3:49 For the front, I wanted Mike the Frog at Treehouse Island 3:51 as if her were posing for a photo. 3:54 So I split the illustration up into 2 pieces. 3:57 I had the island, which I had to create, which is going to be the background, 3:59 and then I have Mike the Frog. 4:02 By splitting it up, I'm able to move Mike the Frog around on top of the complete background. 4:04 To draw Mike the Frog, I used an old sketch I did for the T-shirt as reference. 4:09 [?Fast music playing?] 4:13 Once I felt I had a solid sketch, it was then time to move on to the inking. 4:20 The tools I used for this were tracing paper and an ink Bristol brush. 4:25 I simply put the tracing paper over the sketch and began inking with the Bristol brush. 4:28 I used the thick-to-thin line technique, as I usually do with my illustrations in Illustrator. 4:33 The basic rule for the thick-to-thin line technique is that wherever the lines meet 4:38 or wherever there's a drop shadow, the line will be a little bit thicker, 4:42 whereas the end points of the lines will be thinner. 4:46 The same rule goes when we create it in Illustrator, 4:49 and you'll see this in the technique breakdown. 4:52 [?Fast music playing?] 4:53 When I'm finished, I take a photo with my iPhone, 4:59 and I'm ready to bring this into Illustrator. 5:01 Now, before I begin designing the postcard, let's take a look at the technique breakdown. 5:04 Before we begin illustrating the postcard, I want to show you the techniques 5:10 I will be using throughout the design. 5:13 I like to refer to this technique as a thick-to-thin pen technique. 5:15 You really only need 2 tools: the pen tool and the width tool, 5:19 and there's really only 1 rule you need to follow. 5:23 And that's when the 2 paths intersect, or 3 paths, or more, 5:26 basically those paths need to be a little bit thicker than the end points. 5:30 And I can show you in a quick example. Say, if we make a smiley face with the eyes closed. 5:35 [?Slow music playing?] 5:40 There's 1 eye, there's 2 eyes, and let's create the mouth. 5:42 [?Slow music playing?] 5:48 And we'll do a line for the teeth. There we go. 5:56 And some smile marks 6:01 right at the ends of the cheeks there. All right. 6:04 So let's make these halves intersect here. Zoom in. 6:07 Select tool, and make them touch. Perfect. 6:12 And good. Line all these up, and there we go. 6:17 Now let's duplicate this so we can look at it in comparison. 6:23 Zoom out, center these in here inside the art board, nice. 6:26 All right. So we'll use the thick-to-thin line technique with the right face here. 6:33 So like I said, the end points usually want to stay pretty thin, 6:38 and then wherever there's a drop shadow or wherever it would intersect-- 6:42 so that would be like the lower part of the eye here. 6:46 If the light's shooting down, it would cause a shadow underneath the eyes. 6:49 So that would be thicker, and then wherever this intersects here, that would be thicker 6:54 usually because it causes a shadow; so what we can do is select both of the eyes 6:59 and change that width profile from uniform 7:07 and make it go from thin to thick. 7:14 Now, what I want to do is make this a little bit thicker, and this a little bit thinner over here. 7:20 So I'll press shift w. What that does is it grabs the width tool over here. 7:24 So we're able to actually make that thicker, make that thinner, make that thinner. 7:29 And you can see that right there is much different than this over here. 7:37 And we can actually do the eyes a little bit different, just to give them a little bit more 7:40 of a characteristic from one to the other. Nice. 7:45 And the smile. So with this, with these end points, we want to make these really thin, 7:50 and then this really thick where it intersects, like so. 7:54 Same on the other side. 7:59 And this middle would be thicker because there would be more of a drop shadow. 8:04 And this would be a little bit thicker out here. 8:08 And this here. Grab it. There we go. Nice. 8:13 Now for the bottom part of the mouth, we're going to make this really thick down here 8:21 because there would be a drop shadow and this still thick but not as thick. 8:25 So what we can do is actually up the stroke like so, and that right there is pretty good. 8:30 Now let's just make the bottom a little bit thicker, 8:37 and thin it up here and here, and same goes for the teeth. 8:40 Now the teeth, we want this thin and this thick out here. 8:46 So again, let's bump up the stroke, 8:51 and then we can make this in the middle just a little bit thinner. 8:54 Perfect. Let's up the strokes a little bit. There we go. 9:00 Nice. Now let's take a look at these in comparison. 9:04 For the back of the postcard, I'm going to be using a significant amount of text. 9:10 Now, in most cases, when you send a file to the printer and there's text in it, 9:14 you want to create that text into an outline, because if the printer doesn't have that font, 9:18 it won't show up correctly. 9:24 So as an example, I can take a word like "create" 9:26 [?Slow music playing?] 9:29 and as you can see here, it says create clearly. 9:35 But if we switch the view to paths or outline, we don't see any paths or outline. 9:38 Now let's look at that in comparison to this rectangle. 9:46 You can clearly see there's paths here. 9:49 Now when we switch back over to preview, you see the fill. 9:52 So what we want to do is take this text and turn it into an outline. 9:58 We can do that by simply selecting the text and create outlines. 10:01 This also can be done by going to type and create outlines. 10:05 So now when we shift over to the view of outline, you can see create now has an outline. 10:10 Now I like to do this for most of my artwork. 10:17 So anything that goes to print, if it has paths like what we just created with the smiley faces, 10:19 you can see these paths are the same thing, 10:25 and that's because we're in outline view. 10:28 Now if we switch back over to preview, it looks much different. 10:30 So what we want to do is take this set, object, path, outline stroke, 10:32 and now when we look at it with an outline, you can see there's actual outlines. 10:40 Now when they cut the plate for letterpress, if this were going to letterpress, 10:48 it would cut these paths. So what we want to do is merge these. 10:52 We can do that by selecting it, opening up our pathfinder and select merge, 10:54 and all of our paths line up. 11:01 So moving forward, we're going to be using the technique of 11:04 the thick-to-thin line, and then taking all of our artwork, creating a new file 11:06 and then merging and outlining all of the text and paths. 11:11 With that said, let's get started. 11:16 [?Synthesized music playing?] 11:18 Now that the print file is set up, the front and back are in different layers, 13:30 I'm ready to send it off to Mama's Sauce. 13:33 Here we are at Mama's Sauce in Orlando, Florida, 13:37 where we're getting our custom postcards printed for Treehouse. 13:39 To my left we have Brooks, who is the director of marketing for Mama's Sauce. 13:42 Brooks, how're you doing? >>I'm doing pretty good. >>All right. 13:46 Brooks, can you tell us a little bit about Mama's Sauce and what you guys do here? 13:48 Sure. Yeah, Mama's Sauce is a screenprint and letterpress print shop, 13:51 specializing in customizing art processes for the strange ideas that designers come up with. 13:55 [Mat laughing] And that exactly was my thought when I was designing for the postcards. 14:00 I didn't know exactly what I was going to be designing, but I knew 14:05 I wanted to come to Mama's Sauce because there's no guidelines when it comes to printing. 14:09 These guys can basically fabricate and customize anything. 14:12 So with that said, Brooks, can we head on inside and take a look at the process? 14:16 That's my favorite. >>All right. 14:20 [?Slow bass music playing?] 14:22 ?Oh the right thing to decide? 14:42 [?Slow bass music playing?] 14:49 So the first step in printing the Treehouse postcards is screenprinting, 14:55 because it runs on a larger sheet; so we can get the big sheet done, 14:58 then bust it down to smaller sheets to run on our other presses 15:02 that have different tolerances and specifications. 15:04 All of the screenprinting is handled by our master screenprinter, Jesse Adams. 15:07 Jesse, do you have anything to tell us about the screenprint of the Treehouse postcards? 15:11 The first thing, every time, is to check over the art. 15:16 Make sure it's up to spec. 15:19 Our processors have very definite limitations, >>Uh-huh. (affirmative) 15:22 >>and we have to always make sure that we're working 15:26 well enough within those that we can guarantee that we'll output--what we output is top quality. 15:28 [Mat] Sure, sure. Yeah. Like up to how many colors can you do without getting too, 15:34 I guess, gnarly with the actual print? Do you know? 15:40 [Jesse] From a theoretical sense, there's no limit. >>Okay. 15:44 >>From a practical sense, going more than 6 gets a little crazy. 15:48 >>Little crazy? >>When you put water-based ink onto a sheet of paper, 15:53 >>Uh-huh. (affirmative) >>Paper changes shape. 15:58 It grows, it expands from the added moisture content and then the moisture drying out of it. 16:00 And you're always kind of balancing what you're actually doing, what you're putting on the sheet 16:06 with how it's going to affect the physical properties of the paper. >>Okay. 16:10 [Brooks] All right, so the next step in printing the Treehouse postcards 16:15 was the letterpress printing. So we've printed the screenprint on a large sheet, 16:19 cut it down to a smaller sheet, and this allows us to save on printing costs 16:23 as well as maximize our impression strength on a smaller area. 16:26 And all that printing is handled by Hogan, our letterpress printer. 16:30 [Hogan] This is a Heidelberg Windmill, and it is from about, anywhere from 1954 to 1956. 16:34 >>Okay. >>Around there. So right now we have the press running in sort of a neutral mode. 16:43 >>Okay. >>It's a clutch-driven press, so you can see the fly wheel over here 16:50 is just spinning and the press isn't moving. >>Okay. 16:53 >>And that's because the clutch isn't engaged yet. 16:55 [Mat] Okay, so you've got your roller set, right, and then we load it back, 16:57 so now you're applying the ink? Is that correct? 17:01 [Hogan] So it's kind of cool. The good thing about letterpress that's a little different 17:03 than screenprint is the amount of ink that it takes for us to print. 17:06 It's far, far less. >>Oh, really? Very cool. 17:10 >>And we put the base right in here; so we have your card, 17:12 and we use the same registration corner, so it'll go in the slot here, 17:15 and what we do is set these suckers to grab the sheet. 17:18 And it will actually feed the sheet down, and then they pick it back up and pull it out. 17:22 >>Awesome. 17:26 [?Slow bass music playing?] 17:28 So our next process after the letterpress is the die cut, 17:35 because we're actually going to have stands that go on the back of the postcards 17:39 allowing us to turn it into a picture frame. 17:41 And our friend Rob here is going to show us exactly how he die cuts the back. 17:44 >>Yeah. So basically what we have in the press is a die, which is a block of wood 17:47 that has cut rule and score rule built into it. 17:54 So once we put a piece of paper down on the platten, it pushes together with the die 17:57 and pops out from the sheet of paper the actual back stand, 18:03 and puts a score straight into the side of it so that you can fold it easily 18:07 >>Nice. >>so that it'll work. 18:11 >>So you're actually getting the actual crease and cut in 1 shot. 18:13 >>Mm-hmm. (affirmative) >>Awesome. >>Yeah. >>Very cool. 18:16 And this machine is the--? >>This is the Kluge. >>The Kluge. >>Mm-hmm. (affirmative) 18:19 [?Slow bass music playing?] 18:24 [Mat] Now, Brooks, before I leave, can we take a look at some of the print projects 18:28 you guys have done in the past, to really show where the creativity can go? 18:32 Yeah, sure. The ones that kind of pushed the envelope a little bit. 18:38 I'll start with this beauty here, designed by Clark Orr. 18:40 He came to us with this concept for a themed show at Gallery1988, 18:44 and for lick-able wallpaper from the movie we all know and love. 18:48 >>Yeah. That's awesome. >>Already sort of pushing some of the limits 18:52 in some ways, in terms of numbers of colors and some tight registration, 18:55 but we decided to take it a step further. 18:59 We ran it by Clark, and he was really into the idea. 19:01 So we actually mixed this with some fragrance oils. 19:03 We did a lot of research in what would work well with water-based ink, 19:06 and so we actually developed different fragrances for each of the colors on the poster. 19:09 >>That's amazing. So you can sniff the print? >>Oh, yeah. Do you want to--? 19:14 >>Yeah, I want to sniff it. >>This is legal in most states. >>Wow. 19:17 >>Yeah. >>That's awesome. >>Yeah. So that's nice. 19:21 We like keeping that 1 around. It is not super tasty, though. 19:24 So we didn't make it all-the-way lickable. >>Aw, we need to make it, make lickable ink. 19:27 >>We're working on it. We have our best man on it. >>Yeah, snozberries. >>Exactly. 19:31 This is a real fun 1, by our friend Mike Casebolt. >>Yup. 19:34 >>A really fun wedding invite where you have the forest here, opening up. 19:37 And so optimizing with our custom die cut, custom folds, multiple colors inside and out, 19:44 and then it has space for the response card, for the directions, 19:50 and the accomodations information. >>All separate pieces. >>Right. 19:56 Casebolt just using the process to the zenith of its potential. 19:59 And then over here, this 1 was designed by our designer here, Austin Petito, 20:03 and this was actually my personal wedding invitation for my bride and I. 20:08 >>Okay. >>And then, so when you take out the invite, everything's waiting for you 20:12 like a little surprise. >>That's awesome. >>And you've got the RSVP here, 20:17 it's letterpress 2-color, the accomodations, registry information inside there, 20:21 and then some Florida jasmine just to represent--because we had an outside wedding, 20:26 >>Right. Yeah, sure. >>Kind of going with the Almanac and collecting specimens, 20:32 >>That's awesome. >>Little figures for everything there, and we did 20:35 the custom die cut here and stacked 13 sheets deep. 20:38 My wife and I were actually in the back just spraying and hand placing this adhesive. 20:41 You can see the thickness that was created just by individual die cuts. 20:45 >>Yeah. >>I think we die cut over 2,000 sheets just for 120 invites. >>Wow. 20:48 It was an adventure. [Mat laughing] but yeah. >>That's awesome. 20:53 >>There is a lot of different ways you can go with it. >>Awesome. 20:56 Well, I really appreciate it. >>Sure. >>And I'll be back soon to pick up the postcards. 20:58 >>I like that. >>All right. >>Thanks, Mat. >>Thanks, Brooks. 21:01 [?Slow bass music playing?] 21:04 [Some time later. . .] 21:18 [?Soft drumming music?] 21:22 As you can see, the final product turned out amazing. 21:32 Mama's Sauce did a great job constructing the design and making it happen. 21:34 Even the packaging the cards came in just shows the TLC that they put into their products. 21:38 I'm super excited with our final product and had a lot of fun with this project. 21:43 Until next time, have fun, and Exercise Your Creative. 21:48