Say what you want, but I like holiday cards at year’s end. I even had a competition running at FontShop BeNeLux for a couple of years (2007, 2008 & 2009). They are the perfect vehicles for self-promotion, and every year we see designers really outdo themselves when it comes to originality and creativity. My own last foray into this ephemeral art dates from 2011. Due to personal issues I have been merely an observer the past two years. Being a fan of printed cards, I am a little ambivalent about digital cards – they offer exciting new possibilities, but the act of physically sending a printed card shows that you really care. That being said, the digital holiday greeting designed by Paula Scher for Cooper-Hewitt is all kinds of awesome.
True to her continued efforts to treat typography as an expressive medium, communicative beyond the mere words the letters spell out, Paula Sher used obsessive typography to treat the holiday clichés of jingle bells and ho-ho-ho.
The only thing to do is be relentless.
The greeting is a beautiful example of Scher’s signature style, with eclectic type choices, images as letters, dense design, and dynamic motion. There are too many typefaces featured in the video, so I won’t even try to identify them all.