Every year in early December, I find myself staring at a blank page with the self-imposed problem of, “We need another holiday card… in a week!” It’s hard to describe the process after that; a blank canvas has this way of freezing my brain up and stifling the flow of ideas. “Don’t worry, you have a blank canvas and you can be as creative as you want! Think outside of the box!” has always been my least favorite type of creative direction to hear from a boss or a client.

So I start the ideation process with writing down the constraints. Budget, time, size, shape, mailability, target audience, medium, message — the more constraints the better.

Needs to be printable at low quantity in an affordable medium in a timely manner? Check. Needs to fit in a first class postage envelope? Check. Needs to send love and wish my friends and family of various creeds and cultural backgrounds well? Check. And then I just doodle and doodle, on receipts and in notebooks until something checks all those boxes and “clicks.” In the final execution, I redraw the illustration in Illustrator, trying to simplify and take away as many elements as possible while still keeping the composition and message tight.