Maffitt Family Christmas Cards

Brian Maffitt

10 years ago

2014 marks the 10th anniversary of our yearly family tradition of custom Christmas cards, created in Adobe Photoshop. As we wrap up our newest effort this week, I wanted to share some highlights of years past.

2013’s Card was an homage to the board games of our youth.

Denise had the idea to feature Russian Nesting Dolls in 2012, and it was a good excuse to play with Photoshop’s newest 3D tools.

2011’s card was a lot of fun. A good thing about Photoshop is it lets us be as thin as we want to be.

In 2010 we had a wonderful view of the Thanksgiving Parade in New York (thanks to our friend Tari). I used some of the photos I took that day as the basis for our balloon card.

2009 was a challenging year. That’s all I’m going to say about that.

Denise and I had a lot of fun modeling for the “terrified children” in this pose.

This was the only year we did a trifold, where the front of the card folded out to become a bigger image.

2005 featured two versions of a card, one for our more delicate friends and family…

…and a more-irreverent one for the rest of our friends. Silly.

This was our first card, in 2004. It was a little booklet, actually, with each page featuring one or a group of our pets telling a little story. It was WAY too much effort to assemble these (each card had to be cut out and tied together with ribbon), so each subsequent year we have kept “print simplicity” front and center in our designs.