We’ve been getting in the festive mood this week, making holiday cards for ourselves and others. There’s no better way to wrap up the year.

We usually end up making a bunch of holiday cards every year for various clients, but we’re terrible about making them for ourselves. It’s not that we forget, it just that we can never make up our minds about the design. This year was just like the rest. We started talking about what our card would look like in early October, kept tweaking and adding onto the concept through November, and then ended up in early December with a very cool yet complex and time-consuming design that was just never going to get done.

So about three weeks ago we threw that idea out the window and started from scratch. The holidays really aren’t about extravagance, we decided, but rather being with the people you care about. “Simple and sincere” became the core of our message, so we sat down and came up with a new concept that we felt captured those two ideas.

Thus, our card this year is different than previous years in that each and every one was hand made here in the studio. We grabbed a stack of our favorite paper (the soft, velvety Curious Touch Milk), our x-acto knives, embosser and a bunch of pens and spent a several afternoons crafting a couple hundred cards. If you’re a buddy of ripe, check your mailbox! You probably have one waiting for you.

And of course Yimmy, one of our studio cats, decided he would help with the cards too.

We also spent a large amount of time over the past couple of weeks creating an animated holiday card for a new client, FairWinds Partners. We knew the project was going to be fun right off the bat when in our kick-off meeting they gave us carte blanche to pursue whatever direction we wanted. We eventually settled on a fun little animation that drew inspiration from their logo (a sailboat) and from various holiday stories where toys come to life. It’s a nifty little thing, we’d encourage you to check it out!

So that’s it for this year at ripe! We’ll be taking a much needed break between Christmas and New Years (so no blog posts for you), but we’ll be back come January 2012. Happy Holidays!