Many of us spend a good portion of our discretionary dollars celebrating the holidays. The Christmas season, particularly, is filled with items specially designed, by people like me, to prompt your impulse to purchase a little something new for the holidays.

Buying something new is a holiday tradition that draws upon fond memories of Christmas fairs, window displays, fanciful dioramas and visiting the department store or mall to see Santa. Picking up a little something special for this Christmas is one of life’s little pleasures.

As designers, we take into account contemporary design and holiday trends, visual nostalgia hooks and our own memories when creating new products for the season. Whether we are creating point-of-sale or impulse purchases, designing specifically for the holidays has its own special set of demands. The temptation to resort to clichés is strong. Clients often ask us to clearly communicate Christmas without religious imagery. Creating new characterizations of familiar holiday figures without overstepping copyrights is a constant concern.

At Go East, we try to create new takes on the holidays. Creating contemporary, fresh imagery and new ways of saying “Happy Holidays” are key to the success of a holiday design. When we worked with Amy Cartwright on the holiday illustrations for Post-it® Notes, we sought someone with a fresh style that would be a perfect match for the brand. The topics are nostalgic — Santa, Snowman, Penguin — but the style is fun and functional.

My recommendations for holiday designs:

1. Embrace the traditions but push the design. While we celebrate the holidays in the present, the past is always top-of-mind, and the designer needs to take both into consideration. How can you recreate the North Pole? What’s a new way to say “Happy Holidays?” I like to mash up new trends and old celebrations, so I imagine a lot of Twitter tags on presents, Facebook holiday cards and “Bing” White Christmas take-offs.
2. Red and green have been done. Use other colors for a Christmas design that really say “21st-Century celebration.”
3. Know your audiences’ tolerance for “Christmas” versus “holidays.”  Some audiences are OK with Christmas trees; some want you to stick to snowflakes. The retail channel will have a lot of influence here and it is best to communicate any limitations early on in the project.
4. This season, it really is the little things that will count. Whether the gift item is small, the wrapping paper is more minimal or the cards are homemade (or just look that way), look to the small to say something big. From a design perspective that means simple by design, which is a Go East design principle. However, this season it’s more meaningful than ever — and isn’t that what everyone is looking for anyway?

What is your plan to socialize your brand this holiday season? Where will you be and what do you think your customers what to see? Let me know and I’ll friend/follow/group/contact/yelp/link-in you and see what you’ve come up with. I’ll be keeping tabs this holiday season and report back with my favorites at the end of the year.

Posted on Tuesday, August 25th, 2009 by Carla Januska