New Year's card design for 2019
So we’ve arrived at 2019, and hopefully, you took John Oliver’s advice regarding New Year’s Eve. In any case, a happy new year to you.
New Year is a much bigger deal in Japan than Canada, although it doesn’t affect me as I have the same response to it no matter where I am: a noncommital shrug and ignoring in favour of whatever I am doing at the time. This year it was playing Diablo 3 on the Swtich. Or rather it didn’t affect me until I got married and suddenly I was responsible for making the nengajo. 2018’s card was solid, but I like this year’s a lot better, but…
The final art work included a subtle paper pattern in the background which I really like. However, when we printed out the card, things did not turn out well. Aside from the weird colour shift (which is not totally explained by the RGB to CMYK shift), the background texture is completely gone. Yuck. However, it was too late to do anything about it, so they were sent out as it. Last year’s nengajo printed much nicer, but also were on much better quality paper, which I strongly suspect is large part of the culprit.
The other issue is the fault of my crappy memory: for some reason, despite A6 being an international standard paper size (100mm x 148mm), Japan occasionally adds five millimeters to the shorter side – I’ve encountered commercial printers who differ on their sizes for A6, and only A6, which if doublely weird. Nengajo all seem to use the smaller A6, which is a bit of trivia I had forgotten. Ugh. This wasn’t too big of a deal, but still annoying.
It could also be my printer, but it’s always done a pretty solid job. Well, in any case, my main takeaways here are:
- Never assume paper size in Japan, no matter how sure you are, and
- buy the more expensive nengajo.
Lessons for 2019.