Personalised Christmas cards (Week 88)

These cards will have arrived with their recipients by now, so I can blog about them without spoilers: we sent Christmas cards to all our job board gardeners, and the picture on the front is different for each one.

We launched maps in week 82 as a visual way to explore the jobs on a board. And we figured we could give everyone a memento that shows the activity of the companies on their board, as it stands nearing the end of 2019.

So for each gardener, we rendered a custom map of their job board with a couple of differences:

• the bubbles are green for that festive, holly bush feel
• the maps are produced double size so they can be scaled down and printed at 300dpi (print requires high resolution images).

The maps on the website use JavaScript, but we needed static images for printing. To create these automatically, we re-used the same rendering pipeline as used by our Twitter cards. In short, we programmatically fire up the Chrome browser but running on the server, and have it view the custom maps, producing a downloadable screenshot for each one.

The greetings cards themselves are printed by our friends at Moo. They specialise in stationery (like business cards or, yes, greetings cards) where the designs can be individually and simply customised.

The personalised greeting inside each one – well, that at least was done by hand.

It’s neat to look at the cards side by side and see how the different gardeners vary. Keji’s job board covers the Connect Ventures portfolio, and Connect has a deliberate focus on Europe. Compare that to C4V’s board which has a portfolio of later-stage companies which have already started expanding to different territories, and so the jobs are more global.

It was a fun experiment – and from the feedback we’ve had, an eye-catching way of wishing people all the best of the season. We’ll have to do more of this kind of thing in the future.

And to you, dear reader, I trust you’re having a gentle cruise into the holidays. Have an enjoyable festive period if that’s what you celebrate!

– Matt