Regularly-timed holiday cards never work, since the first week of December far too fraught with final papers, projects, and exams for such a piddling task as holiday cards; upon return to hometown, exhausted from the end-of-term onslaught, you're spending every day with the same friends you'd once thought to send holiday cards to anyway. Then all of the pent-up jokes and stories and sentiments have gushed out and gone stale before you even get a chance to unpack the long-saved box of holiday cards.

Well, it's the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, and in full exploitation of my not-very-many-friends-on-campus status, I decided to make some Happy Finals cards for the homefolk in lieu of Happy Holidays ones. This was partially spurred by the receipt of a Veer.com catalogue in my post office box, the address which I used to register for free entrance to the graphics and print design conference SeyboldSF over a year ago. Now, there's junk mail, and then there's junk mail. Veer sells royalty-free image collections and typefaces (that's fonts, for those of us who don't speak fancydesignerese), so its catalog is an accordingly hip and cool preview of such delicacies.

From catalog cutouts, I made four envelopes. They're mildly themed: (1) Bold Red Things, (2) urban, (3) americana, and (4) bookishly mod. The themes themselves weren't planned, but some degree of intraenvelope unity was. The first three were hand-addressed, but only mediocrily, and so on the fourth I gave in and decided to print it out. This was rather a pain in the ass, as I had to hand-measure the desired placement points of the recipient's and return addresses with respect to already rubber-cemented, lay it out in PageMaker, print a proof out on scrap paper, hold the proof and the envelope up to the light to make sure they aligned, and then finally print.

It does look much better than the hand-printed ones, though.

And now for them pesky 55-cent stamps...