When Greeting Cards Fail to Capture the True Emotions of Love

I reckon greeting cards designers should consult real people when looking for wordings for their cards. By which I mean to for example broadcast a link to a submission form on the internet and ask the general population to describe their relationships in 3 positive, romantic and funny lines.

Trying to shop for a Valentine’s Day greeting card that says something similar to real situations is like trying to bake chocolate cookies without chocolate. On top of that, a lot of the time the wordings are similar every year. You feel like cataloguing your cards so that you don’t accidentally buy the same one you bought last year in which you told your beloved that you love them even if they don’t do the cooking or ironing your way.

I also think that there should be more cards that allow you to finish off the card yourself. For example, they could have cartoons on the front cover with blank space for you to write your words with a special pen that comes with the card. It’ll be like a ‘caption this’ challenge.

I would also like blank cards that comes with a detached blank semi-transparent self-adhesive page for us to use to design our own greeting page on our computers. We’d download the template from the brand or supplier’s website, design the greetings page, press Print to get it onto the semi-transparent paper once all has been tested, and attach it to the inside of the card. Too often I see blank cards that show cats, flowers or kids kissing. Boring! I want more than that.

The stationery and scrapbooking shops used to get quite a bit of my money when I was on maternity leave. Everyone received homemade cards for everything including new birth announcement, Valentine’s, Easter, birthdays, Fathers Day and so forth. But then the papers started to get expensive, so I went back to buying cheaper readymade cards. But I’m still unhappy with commercial greeting cards, they are are not as good anymore, which is why I’m complaining today.

If you are a commercial greetings cardmaker, please pretty please try harder and turn your lovey dovey cards into romantic masterpieces as good as a Nicholas Sparks novel. Your cards should make me smile and shed a tear or more when I realise that “This is so us!!” Right now, my first thought when I look at the cards in the shops goes like this:

“Let’s buy this one anyway, it sounds nice and romantic, he’ll shag me after reading this.”

Do you find it hard picking cards off the racks?