Greeting Card Designers and Writers

The mass-produced holiday cards we know today didn't originate until the 1850s in England and America. With printing costs and postage rates low, the colorful, cheerful, and beautifully illustrated cards of the day quickly grew in popularity. According to the Greeting Card Association (GCA), Louis Prang, a German immigrant who started a small lithography business near Boston in 1856, is credited with the start of the greeting card industry in America.

Today, greeting cards are not only available in paper format, but are also sent electronically via e-mail. The GCA reports that the industry is "filled with innovation—sound, light, motion, video, paper craft, pop-up, digital formats, etc., with digital distribution facilitating paper card sending from mobile devices and personal computers, both emerging channels." One thing that hasn’t changed is that greeting cards continue to be an extremely popular method of communicating with friends and family.