’Tis the holiday season again, and what better way to share your travel adventures than by sending a holiday card to your friends and family? Holiday cards are a great way to share a recap of your year with loved ones. Whether you’ve moved to another city, gone on a fun vacation, or welcomed a new member to the family, there is something so personal about taking the time to mail a physical card. With Mixbook, it’s easy to create beautiful, personalized holiday cards right from your phone or on your laptop.

Mixbook is an online service that offers customizable cards, photo books, calendars, and more. It has hundreds of wonderful designs that can be personalized to your liking, or you can build your own card from scratch. You can really be as creative as you like with your Mixbook designs!

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Mixbook Holiday Photo Card Review 

As someone who has lived abroad for over five years, I found it essential to send Christmas cards to my friends and family to help stay in touch. Using store-bought cards was a great way for me to wish them happy holidays and tell them a bit about my life in Europe. When I discovered Mixbook’s holiday photo cards, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of sending personalized Christmas cards before! Now I am by no means a digital designer, but I decided to give it a go and share my travel photos as a holiday card this year, along with a little recap of my life.

Layouts and Designs

I knew I wanted to share between four and six photos from the year and wanted a design that embodied the classic northern holiday charm I grew up with in Canada. I was fully prepared to scroll through pages of designs but was happily surprised to see I could filter the designs by number of photos, type of holiday card (Hanukkah, Christmas, New Year), and design style. I will say it is hard to pick just one design!

Once I chose a design, I then had the option to choose from a variety of card shapes, like a vintage crest shape, rounded corners, and even a ticket outline. The design I chose also had a foil option, and I was able to choose between rose gold, gold, silver, or no foil at all. I’m a sucker for gold, so that’s what I opted for. 

Photo Uploading

I went to upload my photos and was so ecstatic to see I could upload directly from multiple outlets (Instagram, Facebook, Google Photos) rather than just from my phone library. I recently dropped my phone in an Amsterdam canal, so I lost a lot of my pictures. Some of the pictures I wanted to use were on Instagram, but screenshotting photos doesn’t work well. Having the direct link to upload from social media was truly a lifesaver! 

Another great function Mixbook has is the photo quality checker, which will send an alert to you if you have uploaded a photo that doesn’t quite meet the resolution standards for good prints. This is how I found out my screenshotted photos from Instagram would have printed blurry! Mixbook also has the option to hide photos already used in the card, so you don’t accidentally include the same picture twice. You can also organize your photos by date so that you can add them to the design in chronological order and tell the story of your year.

Design Tools and Personalization

After I settled on a gorgeous classic Christmas card layout and uploaded my photos, I decided to tweak the design to fit my own style. As much as I loved the sparkling red background, I wanted something a bit more grounded and old-timey, so I scrolled through the available backgrounds and was surprised to see so many! I settled on a soft green background for the front and a lovely vintage paper background for the back of the card. Mixbook offers hundreds of eye-catching backgrounds but also allows users to upload their own backgrounds, unlike other websites like Shutterfly and Minted. This is a great feature if you already have a design you like or have designed something yourself! 

I then decided to scrap the layout of the card’s back and create my own so that I could add a nice message. I didn’t want any pictures on the back because I wanted the text to be the main focal point, so I browsed through Mixbook’s stickers and found an array of fun holiday stickers to liven up the page. That’s when I saw that Mixbook also allows you to upload your own stickers, which is fantastic. However, I found they had a lot to choose from and chose this adorable snow globe and this cute mistletoe sticker.

Final Design

After adding a little recap of my year and warm wishes, my holiday card was done; it took about 20 minutes. All in all, I was really happy with how simple it was to create a beautiful holiday card that spoke to my own style and felt a bit like home to me. After all, the holidays tend to spark childhood nostalgia! What really stuck out to me was how user-friendly Mixbook’s design tools are and the amount of customizable options it offers. Seriously, I’ve never come across a site that had so much flexibility with design options. You can literally personalize everything, from choosing the stickers to color-matching the Mixbook logo on the bottom to match the theme! 

Mixbook Strengths

Mixbook has a lot of great features that make it easy to personalize and order your holiday cards. A few that really stick out include that:

• your holiday cards come with envelopes included, with the option to save time and preorder with the addresses/names already on them;
• your designs and photos are saved, so you don’t have to complete your holiday card all in one sitting;
• you can upload your own elements like backgrounds and stickers or even add a QR code;
• you can choose from a range of beautiful cards and personalize them as much as you want;
• you can choose what kind of paper you would like, from a pearlescent finish to matte and satin; 
• you can send your cards with a clean conscience, knowing all the paper used is certified by the Rainforest Alliance and the Forest Stewardship Council.

Holiday cards are a timeless tradition, and now you can design your own with a modern twist using Mixbook. I can’t wait to send these out to my family and friends, but I can’t help but wonder if their cards will be as personal as mine… It’s not a competition, though, right? Regardless, we hope you and your family have a lovely holiday season and a happy New Year!

Start creating your own holiday photo card with Mixbook today!