Card tricks

Design - Hugh Aldersey-Williams on Christmas greetings

I used to think it a bit lame to write about Christmas cards, but I noticed last year that half this magazine's columnists did it, so this year I shall as well. But this is not about ordinary cards sent by friends. There'll be no skating vicars or gurning cherubs here. Nor any of those gruesome encyclicals from people you'd completely forgotten since you threw away their last one ("Tony has been promoted - at last! - to deputy regional sales director and enjoyed a trip to Rotterdam. Jocasta has been entertaining us on the recorder!!!"). My subject is the customised cards that designers invariably create at this time of year in order to promote their own talents.

Presents have an obvious biblical precedent, but cards, like so much to do with Christmas, are a Victorian-invented tradition. They began with the man who sought to employ design for the improvement of the masses, Henry Cole, the founder of the Victoria and Albert Museum and one of the organisers of the Great Exhibition of 1851. In November 1843, Cole commissioned an illustrator who devised a religious triptych with a banner wishing "A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to You"; in the bottom corner was a dotted line where the sender was expected to sign the card. The cards were printed for general purchase from a Bond Street shop in time for Christmas. Cole's innovation was perhaps prompted by falling postal rates. It cost a penny to send it, although the card itself, lithographed and hand-coloured, cost a shilling. By the end of the century the card was reprinted, machine-coloured now, for just twopence, and the sending of cards had become a national habit.

Businesses only really began to mark the season when they buried their Scrooge-like past and became "people-friendly". Many make do by sending out calendars overprinted with their logo. Designers' calendars are often a mistake. Either they overwhelm with designs the size of prairies, or they cleverly ensure that it is impossible to write messages against the dates, or in extreme cases even to read the dates at all. The smartest variant of the calendar I ever got was when the postal charges went up rather than down. There were blank grids for the months of December and January, with a 25p first-class stamp pasted on the box for Christmas Day and a 1p stamp, making up the increase, on New Year's Day. You could even use the stamps.

Cards are more the done thing. Some designers hijack a piece of work from earlier in the year. Some essay dreadful puns (designers are seldom good with words). Corporate Graphics International sent a cartoon of one of Santa's weary reindeer with the bubble: "Next year I'm going to insist that he has a March year-end". Not very festive, perhaps, but then the company mainly does annual reports. Wacky photographs of the employees are popular. One company sent me a picture of the variously stockinged feet of its staff. Or that's who I assume they were; I don't know them intimately enough to be sure.

A sure sign that a designer has been at work is when two dimensions are no longer enough. Thomas Manss sent a card printed in green on one side and white on the other, with the outline of a handsaw standing up on end on the front. Fold it back on itself and the serrated outline doubles Rorschach-fashion into a green Christmas tree shape. Could it be a jaded comment on consumerism? The Swedish Ergonomi Design Gruppen, whose work is normally given, as you might expect from its name, to serious good works such as cutlery for disabled people and the popular Baby Bjorn baby harness, sent fold-out specs, not for 3D or a rose-tinted view, but incorporating a starburst filter to make the dullest light sparkle like the Star of Bethlehem. Dinah Casson and Roger Mann sent two touching circles, one showing chromosomes, the other, Canova's "Three Graces". The two cultures, perhaps. I was too lazy to cut them out and fold them into a tree decoration as instructed. Finlayson Design sent what first seemed to be a postcard-sized sheet of white foam plastic. It turned out to have been die-cut, releasing a snowflake - another one for the tree.

My unrepeatable favourite was from the Brand Team. This was more than a card; it was no less than a set of millennium corporate image guidelines - a hardback, ring-bound folder complete with tabs and portentous systematic headings like software packages: "Identity 1.0" and so on. It began with authority: "These guidelines set out the core elements and fundamental principles of the Millennium Brand. It is critical that the brand with its associated values is protected and projected consistently across all areas to ensure that its launch on 31 December gains maximum impact and longevity." There followed the Millennium typeface, "inspired by the typography of the last 2,000 years", in which every letter of the alphabet was different. In the accompanying sample of body copy, the standard Latin blurb designers use when arranging text layouts had been replaced with Up Pompeii cod Latin: "11.59ium Decemberum 31ipsum 1999ium, calendicallus cyclum shiftus momentus," it began. After that, it just got silly. Spoofing the millennium and corporate seriousness as it did, I'm not sure how potential clients took it, but I suspect that, like me, they just couldn't resist.

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