At this hectic, fast-paced holiday-heavy time of year, I’ve decided to cut to the quick and tell you my bottom line. If awards were given out for “Best Online Holiday Photo Cards” our vote would go to Tiny Prints.
What do you want in a holiday card?
If you’re like me, you want a high quality product at a good price from a reliable company. You’d probably also like a vehicle to showcase your kids (or your whole family) in a beautiful, unique way.
Am I pretty close?
Well, that’s exactly what we got from TinyPrints.
This is the second year we’ve ordered holiday cards from TinyPrints* and, I have to tell you, my family and I all agree that this year’s photo cards are the best we have ever made. We chose a couple of card designs (it was hard to narrow it down to just two!). The first was called “Winter Twilight: Holiday”. Here it is:
front of card
(online screenshot to illustrate what you’ll see before you add your photo(s))
inside of card
(online screenshot with standard text
which you can customize for your family)
And the other was called “Winter Forest: Deep Blue” and looked like this:
Front
inside of card
(with sample text, completely custom)
One of my favorite aspects of TinyPrints is the flexibility of the designs. You can customize the card with ease, choosing from many different layouts (there were seven for this card style) and changing the text as much (or as little) as you like.
You can select from a variety of layouts, design accents and photos (which you can add from your computer, Flickr, Picasa or SmugMug).
For example, for Winter Forest, after adding some text, I was left with what seemed to me to be a gaping hole between my greetings and my signature lines. My kids started suggesting that we add stickers after we get the cards (something which did not appeal to me in the least). I went over to the left sidebar and saw this:
Four little design accents!
The snowflake was perfect for our sentiment, so I clicked on it, dragged it over to the middle of the card and loved it.
You can resize the accents and move them around so you wouldn’t necessarily have to place it in the center. Again, terrific customizing capabilities.
As for the photos, you can modify them as you’re creating the card! Here are the photo editing tools you’ll see:
At the end of the day, the resulting product is a beautiful card with a high quality feel and heavy weight card-stock with good image quality. We wanted a wide variety of card designs and were more than pleased with the options provided by TinyPrints. My daughter and I are rather picky about fonts and were happy to find more than enough choices.
Speaking of my daughter, she had a lot of fun helping me make the card. The added benefit of having the kids help make the family holiday card? Priceless.
As for timeliness?
I received my cards sooner than I expected (without paying any additional shipping fees). They’re proud to tell you that they have the fastest processing time in the industry.
The only criticism I would make about the cards has to do with the packaging – I’d love a cute (even if quite simple) box in which to store the cards. But, then again, it always seemed a bit wasteful to me when other companies included boxes with their holiday cards. The point is to write, address, stamp and mail them, so they probably won’t stay in the box very long. Certainly not more than a month or so.
So…bottom line?
If you want high quality photo cards, give order TinyPrints a try. I think you’ll be glad that you did.
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*Full disclosure: After ordering several stationery items over the past couple of years from TinyPrints at my expense (including our holiday cards last year), TinyPrints asked me to write a review of their cards this year and the company covered the cost of the cards. I did not agree to (or even assure them that I would) only write a favorable review (nor did they insist that I do so). In fact, they encouraged me to write any negative things about the experience, but I had no problems and truly enjoyed the experience. Most importantly, I honestly love these cards and am eager to proudly share them with our friends and family. The credit provided by TinyPrints exceeded the cost of the cards, so I ordered some other items, about which I will write in another post (or two).
