After outlining my mini illustrations and applying some to the website I found myself drawn to three design in particular; the sloth bear, the snow pig and the twin hamsters. They were strong on their own, cute as well as slightly quirky and they felt comfortable next to each other as a set, not only with design but with colour too.
Although I still wanted my set of six, so I decided to make variants on my strongest designs and produce singular as well as patterned versions of each card. This twin set for each design makes them collectable yet keeps a consistency to the brand instead of having six random illustrations. There's enough variation to keep things interesting but not so much that the designs become separate from each other.
So why did I choose a portrait layout as opposed to the traditional landscape? A few reasons, the first is that my designs looked better on a portrait layout, when placed in landscape the hamsters and bear looked far too small. The second reason was that it was slightly different, something is more likely to get attention when it stands out from the rest. The third is that portrait acts as a frame for the images making more like little personal pictures/photos, something worth cherishing. And the final reason is that in my experience, at least with purses and not wallets, cards go into their slots in portrait way round not landscape, the cards accommodate my purse and others.
For the text I used Raleway, the same font that I had used throughout my website. I decided that instead of mixing and matching fonts I would use raleway throughout all my promotional material to keep a consistency to my brand.
