Seasonal & Holiday Graphics

Seasonal & holiday clipart: the shortest-lived graphics in design

Seasonal work is the one category where originality about the subject is off the table. A client wants the season recognized in a quarter of a second, from across a shop, by somebody half paying attention. The motif has to be one already sitting in the reader's head, so the vocabulary stopped taking new entries a long time ago. Palette, composition and craft are yours, but the nouns are fixed.

The card that started the industry was a way of avoiding letters. In 1843 Henry Cole, a civil servant who had helped set up the Penny Post three years earlier, found he had more Christmas correspondence than he intended to answer. He asked the painter John Callcott Horsley for a design he could post instead: a family at table in the central panel, feeding the hungry and clothing the poor down either side. A thousand were lithographed and hand-coloured by a colorist named Mason, and the ones Cole did not need sold for a shilling each at his shop on Bond Street. The temperance movement complained, because there was wine on the table and a child holding a glass.

What has changed is the number of moments. A Victorian printer had a handful of dates worth setting type for. A retail calendar now runs one every few weeks, and each one arrives wanting a story, a post, a header and a shelf sticker off the same motif. Almost none of that justifies commissioning an illustrator. So somebody opens a pack and has the whole season built by afternoon.

Where seasonal artwork runs

• Retail point of sale. Window vinyls, shelf barkers and aisle signage, all produced weeks ahead and installed on one date.
• Email and social calendars. The highest-volume use, where one motif has to work as a header, a story, and a square post.
• Limited edition packaging. Seasonal sleeves and tins over an existing range, with the base pack untouched underneath.
• Cards and gift wrap. Products with a short commercial lifespan.
• Hospitality specials. Menu inserts, table talkers and chalkboards for a set menu running through one holiday.

Running a seasonal clipart through a campaign

Pick one motif to carry the season and demote everything else. Recognition happens in a fraction of a second, and it happens off a single object, so a layout holding five holiday nouns is not five times as festive. It is just busier. Once you have chosen the hero, build it at your largest format and then look at it small, because nearly everything designed for a season of celebration ends up on a shelf sticker or a favicon eventually. And you definitely want a detail to vanish at 20mm.

The other part of the job is housekeeping. Which means you should keep the seasonal artwork on its own layer, well away from the brand furniture, because all of it has a hard expiry date and on 1 November somebody has to lift the pumpkins out without rebuilding the file. Lastly, consider putting the year in the filename before you archive — as you will be back in eleven months wanting to know what you already used, and if you aren't, whoever inherits the folder will be.