Greeting Cards and Invitations With AI: The Picture Is Easy, the Words Are Yours

Nobody needs an AI to make a birthday card. A folded sheet and a pen have done the job for a very long time. What an image generator changes is the picture on the front: the one you could see in your head and could not draw. Below is one year of cards made at one kitchen table in Fellowi Images, by a maker we will call Ines. She is a composite; the lessons are the ones everybody learns.

One rule sits under all four occasions, so it comes first: the picture is the machine’s job, the words are yours. Letters inside a generated image come out misspelled or warped often enough that a name or a date should never be in the prompt. Ask for space instead (“large empty area at the top, no text”) and set the words afterwards in any design tool, or with a pen.

March: an eightieth birthday, from an old photo

Ines’s grandmother was turning eighty, and the family had one photo everybody loved: her as a young woman on a bicycle, in a hat, on a lane lined with trees. Ines wanted it as a soft watercolour on the front of the card. She attached the scan as a reference image and wrote the scene around it: “watercolour painting of the woman in the reference on a bicycle, wide brimmed hat, tree lined country lane, early summer, loose brushwork, large empty sky at the top, no text”.

What she learned is how a reference works. It does not retouch the old photo; it redraws the whole picture, using the photo as a guide. The bicycle, the hat and the lane carried over well. The face was the part that drifted most: close, not exact. For a watercolour, close was enough, and the family recognised her by the hat as much as by the face. If you need the face exactly as it was, put the real photo on the card. Note also that the cheapest image family takes no references, so pick one that does; editing with your own photo walks through it.

One more thing, said plainly: a real person’s photo needs that person’s permission and your right to use it. Family usually says yes. Ask anyway. Ines’s grandmother was delighted to be asked, which is half of what a birthday card is for.

June: a save-the-date, shape first

In spring her brother set a wedding date and asked for a save-the-date postcard: an olive grove on a hill, the evening they had picked. Ines generated her first version in the square frame she had used all year, liked it, and then found that cropping it to a landscape postcard cut the hilltop off.

The rule:decide the shape of the card before the first generation. Ask the print shop for its format, then choose the matching aspect ratio in the studio, and only then write the prompt. Place the empty area deliberately: “olive grove on a gentle hill at golden hour, wide view, the lower third pale and empty for text, no text”. A picture made in the right shape keeps its subject where you put it; which shape suits which place has more. Before anything goes to print, show it to the couple. It is their date, and their hill.

December: a set of winter cards that belong together

In winter Ines wanted a different card for each group of friends, all of them clearly from the same hand. The trap with a set is that every generation arrives in a new style, and the pile looks like it came from ten shops.

The rule:write one style line and paste it unchanged into every prompt (“gouache illustration, deep green and cream palette, simple shapes, visible paper texture, large empty area on the right, no text”), and change only the subject: a fox in fresh snow, a lit window at dusk, a bicycle with a wreath in its basket. Then attach the first card she liked as a reference image, so the palette and the brushwork carry over. Expect small drift between cards, generate a few more than you need, and keep the ones that sit together on the table. A style line like that is worth saving; keeping a prompt library explains how.

Saturdays: thank-you notes for a market stall

Ines sells preserves at a weekend market, and she started tucking a small thank-you card into every bag: a jar on a windowsill, a sprig of herbs, the same gouache style as winter. That is commercial use, and it is allowed. Our terms place no restriction on it: you may sell what you generate, put it on a product or use it in client work, and we take no share and require no credit. The commercial use guide has the clause.

Two caveats come with it. There is no exclusivity: another stall writing a similar prompt can receive a very similar jar. And there is no copyright warranty, as who owns AI-generated images explains. So the stall’s name, and anything Ines would want to protect, lives in her own design file, not in the picture.

A card that moves

One cousin lives abroad and reads everything on a phone, so his winter card became a few seconds of video: snow falling past the lit window. Fellowi Video animates a still image. Give it the picture without any text, and add the greeting on top in your editor afterwards, for the same reason as always. The difference between starting from a picture and from a sentence is in text to video vs image to video.

What it cannot do

• It cannot spell. Names, dates, addresses and the RSVP line belong in a design tool or in your handwriting.
• It cannot promise a good print. A picture that looks sharp on a phone can come out soft on paper. Ask the printer for its minimum pixel size and check your download against it before you order; the qualities on offer are on the product page.
• It cannot hold a real face exactly. A reference keeps a resemblance, not a likeness. For a card where the face must be true, use the photo itself.
• It cannot keep a set perfectly identical. References and a fixed style line hold the look closely, not exactly.
• It does not print, post or send anything. There is no print service and no mailing behind the studio. You get a file; the paper, the envelope and the stamp are yours.

A generation that fails is refunded; a finished picture you simply do not like is not. So try ideas cheaply before the final version, as drafting before you spend describes, and see the product page for what each render costs.

Keep the files

Generated files are kept for a limited time and then deleted (the current period is on the product page). Download a card the day you choose it, keep the version without text next to your design file, and save the prompt with it. Next March there will be another birthday, and you will want to start from the lane with the trees, not from nothing.