Creating Holiday Cards with Publisher

Instructor: Daniel Chong Email: [email protected]

Course Objective: To create custom holiday cards using Microsoft Office – Publisher, while learning the basics

of the Publisher Program.

What is Publisher?

Publisher is a graphic design application that is offered by Microsoft in its Office Suite, although it does not

come with standard edition. While we offer this application on our computers here at the Bloomingdale

Library, if you wanted to use it at home you would most likely have to add it onto your current suites.

Publisher is used for creating a myriad of different types of publications such as: brochures, newsletters,

yearbooks, photo albums and business/greeting cards. Tonight we will focus on making greeting cards,

specifically cards to send to friends and loved ones over the holiday. While there are more robust tools that

can accomplish this, such as Adobe InDesign or Quark Express, Publisher is considered to be an easy to use,

entry level application. For this reason it makes it ideal for regular Joes, like you and me, to create custom

publications. It functions similarly to Word or PowerPoint, so if you have any experience with those

applications, you will feel right at home using publisher after a brief introduction.

In this class we will be using Publisher from the Office 2016 suite, although if you have an earlier version at

home, the interface will be similar.

Getting Started

Publisher can be opened like any other program that we have on our computer, we can find it on the desktop

(Teal “P” | Similar to the Blue “W” for Word). From there it’s a simple double-click and we’re in! If for some

reason it cannot be found on your desktop, then you can simply search for it in the start menu, and then click

the application

when it comes up.

When the

application starts,

you will be greeted

with the following

screen. From here

you can choose

one of the many

templates, or you

can create a blank

document.

Once you decide whether or not you’re going to use a template or a blank document, then the first thing you

should do is to save the file with the name you would like. By default the name of the document will be

“Publication2,” you can either save it as that or create a name suited to you. The most important thing is being

able to find it when you want to come back to work on it!

User Interface (UI)

Before we start, I wanted to give you a little bit of information about the User Interface that is used here in

Publisher. While similar to Word and PowerPoint, there are some differences that could seem confusing at

first, also it never hurts to go over the basics.

 Quick Access Tool bar

o Can be found in the upper-left corner

o By Default contains Save, Undo, and Redo but it can be customized to hold whatever you

want.

 Ribbon

o Located along the top, this is where we will find all our tools that we can utilize with

Publisher.

o Just like the Quick Access Tool Bar, this can be customized.

o This is broken into tabs to better organize your workflow.

o By default our ribbon holds: File, Home, Insert, Page Design, Mailings, Review, and View.

The three things you will be using the most often will be the Home, Insert, and Page Design Tabs. This will be

where the majority of your design tools will reside. The File tab can be used to do backend things such as

saving or printing; it also holds the Business Information function, which can be used to include things like

Company Name, Logo and job titles as a preformatted template to be inserted where we like. While we will

not be covering this tonight, it is a good tool to know that could potentially save you a lot of time.

Creating a Holiday Card

While it is possible to create custom cards using publisher, for tonight we will look through several of the

premade templates and I will show you how to customize from there. To find the right Holiday Card Template,

we will, in the starting screen, search for “Holiday” in the bar. This will bring up several different templates

that we can choose from. The First one we will look at is called “Greeting Cards – Winter Holiday Design.” Go

ahead and open that and you will find yourself looking at a screen similar to this (See Next Page…)

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Now this is a very basic Christmas card template. As you can see, it offers two cards per page, and since there

is an inside greeting, there is a second premade page. The way to get the two pages to print on the same piece

of paper is to simply print on both side of the paper (flipped long-side). From here we can customize the card

as we wish.

On your computer, you will find a stock family photo (it should be residing on your desktop). If you navigate to

the “Insert” tab on the top ribbon, you will find an option to insert illustrations. One of the options within that

group is called “Pictures.” This will allow us to insert pictures in a saved location that we have access too, such

as the desktop or C drive. It will open a file explorer and we can choose our picture from there. The steps can be

followed below.

After inserting the picture, you can resize and move it as you wish. To

see where you might fold the cards you can turn on the “Guides” on the

page design tab, in the layout group, as seen to the right.

Also note, that the picture should go on the second page, as that is our

inside portion of the card. On the following page you can see an example

Now that we have our beautiful family photo, let’s spice the actual card up a bit. After all, we are competing

with our neighbors!

We will change the background to more of a Christmas theme, so to do that we can go to the “Page

background” group located on the Page Design tab (note: its located on the far right of the ribbon).

With this tool we can change the background color of the page we are currently on. We can change it to a

solid color, or a gradient scale. Since Christmas colors are Green and Red we will choose the gradient. When

you click background you will get the option for present colors and gradients, but go ahead and choose “More

Backgrounds.” This will let us choose the style of background we would like. Choose the “Gradient” check box

and you will be given a background formatting tool. This can be seen on the next page.

Note: If you are using colored paper at home (which I recommend doing to save ink) you will not need to do

this step.

In the section called “gradient stops” you will find little flags that you can slide, each one of these will affect

how your gradient looks. Since we want both green and red on both our cars, we will make 4 flags. The two

outer ones will be red, while the two inner ones will be green. This will give us a full spectrum of Christmas

colors on both cards.

When we are done our cards second page, should look like this. Go ahead and apply the gradient to the first

page as well, this will keep our card consistently colored.

Now that we have our Picture and background chosen, we can customize our greetings or format the one that

is already there. To create your own text box you would choose the “Draw Text Box” option in the text group

which is part of the Insert ribbon.

Within the text box you can format your text in the same ways that you would in a normal word processor.

Changing things like font weight or color as well as font type and size.

The last thing we will cover is called Schemes. This can be found in the “Page Design” tab and is in the middle

of the ribbon.

Think of schemes as themes for our pages, here we can choose colors that go well together, as well as change

font types that affect our whole document. Since we are making a holiday card if you hit the double arrow on

the right side of the color chooser, you will be presented with the whole suite of scheme colors. There is one

called “Mistletoe,” go ahead and choose that one. This will change our font to green, but that will clash with

our background, so to make the final touches we will change our font color to white, to be more in line with

our pictures background color. To do this just highlight each section of text, and then change the color to

white using the color selector on the homepage.

There you have it! A customized Christmas card, that you can send your friends and family. I hope you have a

wonderful holiday season, and a happy new year!