If there’s one thing I hate about holidays, it’s picking postcards. Don’t get me wrong — I love handing them out to my loved ones but there’s one specific aspect of it that I find so tedious: The actual design.
I don’t know about you but I’ve gotten tired of the overused Hallmark stuff.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t really do anything about it since I’m not an artistic person. I wanted to put my own flair into my holiday greetings but I couldn’t design my own until something happened over the last year.
Artificial intelligence not only got smarter, but it also got a lot more creative. Designs that were only in my head could become reality with just a single prompt. Honestly, it’s an early Christmas miracle that I’ve been able to design my own postcards.
And honestly anyone can do it.
I spent a few minutes in DALL-E and found a bunch of prompts you can use to create some beautiful holiday postcards.
Awesome Holiday Postcard Prompts
Each holiday will have three prompts: one asking for a simple postcard design for that particular holiday and two modified prompts.
Christmas & New Year’s Eve
Prompt: A unique Christmas postcard design
Prompt #1:
An art deco-style postcard featuring a glamorous Christmas Eve party set
in the roaring 1920s with flapper fashion and Gatsby-inspired decor.
Prompt #2:
A postcard that showcases a multicultural Christmas celebration,
featuring diverse traditions and festive elements from around the world.
Prompt #3:
A whimsical Christmas postcard design set indoors,
in the style of vintage children’s books.
Halloween
Prompt: A unique Halloween postcard design
Prompt #1:
An intricate, vintage Halloween postcard. The scene features a whimsically carved pumpkin
with a large, grinning face. A black cat wearing a witch’s hat. A crescent moon. It must be set
during under a dusky twilight sky filled with stars. The border of the postcard
is decorative with an early 20th-century aesthetic, and the overall tone is one of
playful but creepy, old-fashioned Halloween celebration.
Prompt #2:
A Halloween postcard inspired by Tarot cards. It must feature an old and creepy mansion.
Infuse the card with a sense of dread and suspense.
Prompt #3:
A Halloween postcard inspired by vintage Halloween illustration with a textured paper background.
Add a silhouette of a two children in old-fashioned Halloween costumes,
both holding pumpkin candy baskets. Decorate the scene with fallen
autumn leaves and a sense of spooky nostalgia.
Thanksgiving
Prompt: A unique Thanksgiving postcard design
Prompt #1:
A postcard design featuring an autumnal equinox celebration with strong Thanksgiving themes, in a mystical, fantasy art style.
Prompt #2:
A Thanksgiving postcard design featuring harvest festival at a barn, with quilt patterns adorning the landscape, in a folk art style.
Prompt #3:
A Thanksgiving holiday postcard featuring whimsical woodland creatures sharing a Thanksgiving feast, in a storybook illustration.
Chinese New Year
Prompt: A unique Chinese New Year postcard design
Prompt #1:
A Chinese New Year postcard design inspired serene and minimalist ink wash painting
depicting a quiet family dinner for Chinese New Year, with subtle red accents.
Prompt #2:
A Chinese New Year postcard design featuring a vibrant watercolor scene of a
bustling Lunar New Year market in Beijing with red lanterns and dragon dancers,
in the style of traditional Chinese painting.
Prompt #3:
A Chinese New Year postcard design featuring a magical realism scene where
the Jade Emperor observes Chinese New Year celebrations from the clouds,
with a mix of celestial and earthly festivities.
Valentine’s Day
Prompt: A unique Valentine’s Day postcard design
Prompt #1:
A Valentine’s Day postcard design based on a watercolor illustration of a Parisian street,
with a focus on a quaint café where a couple is toasting with glasses of wine,
the Eiffel Tower in the background
Prompt #2:
A A Valentine’s Day postcard design based on an abstract composition of
swirling colors in shades of red, pink, and gold, with silhouettes of a couple in a
loving embrace, the patterns forming a subtle heart shape at the center.
Prompt #3:
A Valentine’s Day postcard design featuring a whimsical garden with heart-shaped flowers
under a pink and orange twilight sky, with two paper origami cranes sitting on a bench.
Father’s Day
Prompt: A unique Father’s Day postcard design
Prompt #1:
A Father’s Day postcard featuring a hyper-realistic illustration on a postcard depicting
a father teaching a child to ride a bike at sunset, with the words
‘Happy Father’s Day’ glowing in the twilight.
Prompt #2:
A beautiful, rustic, folk art style Father’s Day postcard showing a father and child planting a tree.
Prompt #3:
A Japanese ukiyo-e style postcard depicting a father teaching his child to fish,
with kanji characters for ‘Strength and Patience”
Mother’s Day
Prompt: A unique Mother’s Day postcard design
Prompt #1:
A postcard based on an impressionistic oil painting of a mother and child’s silhouette against
a vibrant sunset over the ocean, with ‘Love You, Mom’ written in the sand.
Prompt #2:
A vintage 1950s-style Mother’s Day card featuring a classic kitchen scene but with a feminist twist.
Prompt #3:
A Mother’s Day postcard featuring a watercolor scene of a mother deer
and fawn in a sun-dappled forest clearing, with ‘Happy Mother’s Day.”
A Few Reminders
Although it’s miles better than Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, always keep in mind that DALL-E 3 still isn’t that good at text generation. Scroll up and check how many spelt the name of their holidays correctly.
I recommend using photo editors such as Photoshop along DALL-E 3 to clean up any mistakes. Also remember when it comes to creating images yourself, you should be as detailed as possible with DALL-E 3.
Consult art guides to find a style you want to replicate and include them in your prompt. If you don’t know how to craft one, use GPT-4V(ision) to generate prompts for postcards you find online.
It may take a while and a whole lot of patience but, once you master DALL-E 3, you can make stunning holiday postcards yourself. In the meantime, you can use or tweak any of these prompts to your liking! Hope this helps!
