Creative Greetings Card Inspiration featuring Illustrated By Laura

When we came across the wonderful @illustratedbylaura on Instagram, we knew her work would be just perfect for a CEWE photo product. Characterised by her quirky illustrations and dainty hand lettering, Laura’s talents are clearly evident, and we love how she takes inspiration from nature and animals to create each of her unique designs. Read on as we introduce you to Laura’s work and offer you a few design tips and ideas for using her illustrations to create your own personalised greetings cards.

A bit about Laura…

Laura is based in Southampton, where she lives with her husband and three children, all under the age of five. Her background lies in the creative arts and Laura has always found herself with a pen, paintbrush or pencil in her hand. She studied art and graphic art at college, followed by art at foundation level and then finally a degree in Communication Design.

Laura worked for many years as a graphic designer and has always drawn in her spare time, but her turning point came after having her first child. While producing artwork for his nursery and designing her own greetings cards, she realised that she would prefer to design and create artwork that brings joy to others instead of sticking to brand guidelines and briefs, spelling the beginning of Illustrated By Laura.

“I love to illustrate plants, birds and animals and feel especially inspired by the area I live in. Illustrating is a wonderful way of unwinding and I find it extremely therapeutic.“

Laura Young

Laura takes bespoke artwork commissions which frequently include gifts for special occasions such as weddings and birthdays, as well as personal designs unique to each individual client. All her artwork is hand-drawn in pencil, coloured using markers and then finished with fine liner detail.

You can explore more of Laura’s artwork here via her Etsy store and her Instagram account.

Her bespoke designs

Among Laura’s range of beautiful designs, we’ve hand-picked two of our favourites that we can exclusively offer as digital downloads for you to use in your next CEWE creation. Introducing… Mixed Leaves and Sweet Treats! If you would like to save either of these designs, simply click Mixed Leaves or Sweet Treats to save a copy of the file to your device.

Illustrated greetings card design inspiration

Now we’re equipped with some beautiful designs courtesy of Laura, we’re ready to put them to good use! Next, we’ll show you how we used the CEWE Creator Software to design our own greetings cards featuring the Mixed Leaves and Sweet Treats illustrations. Read on as we talk you through the design process and offer a few tips and tricks along the way!

Add and edit your own custom text

Here, we started by choosing a Page Layout from the left-hand menu that would give our greetings card design a stylish white border. We simply dragged and dropped this onto the card design to apply it.

Next, we added some text and changed the font and alignment using the editing options along the top toolbar. Don’t forget, you can also alter size, colour, position and rotation of your text from here, so feel free to get as creative as you like!

Finally, we added a white fill to our text box to make sure our leafy pun was perfectly legible against its background.

Customise your cards with colour

We think Laura’s tasty Sweet Treats design makes the perfect birthday card, so we added it to a landscape greetings card with some celebratory text over the top. Not satisfied with just a standard text box, we decided to use the colours from within the design to take it to the next level!

To create our pink border, we right-clicked on the text box and selected ‘Frames’ from the menu. We then used the ‘Pick Screen Colour’ option to select the exact shade of perfect pink inside the cake on the design to use as the border to our text box.

To fill in the text box, we used the Fill button along the top toolbar and selected the ‘Pick Screen Colour’ option again to choose a subtle off-white from the design.

Get creative with clipart

We love to use our Creator Software to its full potential, especially where clipart is concerned! To create this design, we scaled down and then duplicated Laura’s leafy illustration to create a strip of blank space along the middle of the card.

We then inserted some clipart from the Valentine’s Day category to finish off our dreamy design.

Top tip: You can find a selection of shapes, illustrations, lettering and objects within our clipart library. Plus, it’s all filtered by occasion and theme, meaning you’ll have easy access to clipart that’s relevant to your greetings card!

Add a touch of sparkle with Highlights

When creating this party invitation using our Stationery Cards, we knew it called for something a little different, something that would make a lasting impression… enter Gold Highlights! The perfect way to set the tone for any special occasion, your invites will look and feel luxurious with a tactile metallic touch.

Available in Gold, Silver and Gloss, Highlights are a wonderful way to bring a design to life and can be added to text, line and clipart elements within your design. We think the Highlighted text on Laura’s design really emphasises her wonderful illustrations!

Change card format and add a transparent text box

In the CEWE Creator Software, you can alter the orientation of your greetings cards using the rotation tool along the toolbar beneath your design. For this card, we opted for a sleek portrait fold card with some stylish typography to emphasise the main message.

We created a transparent effect in the text box to ensure the writing is clear whilst still showcasing every inch of the gorgeous design underneath. This can be achieved by filling the text box with your preferred colour, right-clicking the text box and selecting the ‘Transparency’ option from the drop-down menu.

The end results… With the two illustrated designs, we created a good luck card, a thank you card, a birthday card, a luxurious party invitation and a thoughtful love card. Have you been inspired to design your own creative greetings cards?

If you decide to use either design in your own creations, we would love to see what you come up with. Don’t forget to share a photo of your products on social media – tag us @cewe_uk on Twitter or Instagram and we might just repost your design for the world to see!

Other Creative Design Ideas

Whilst we love the idea of personalising your greetings cards with Laura’s exclusive illustrated designs, there’s plenty more you can achieve with them if you choose! Here are a few more of our favourite ways to use creative designs: