New Blog Cover (Blender, After Effects)
October 23, 2025
2025-26 Annual Holiday Card
As I mentioned in a previous post, I’ve been making my own annual holiday cards to send out to family and friends for about 10 years now. The common denominator is that I usually include Studio Ghibli’s Totoro and his pals in some form, but I change up the the scenarios and formats every year so I can experiment with different techniques and try to raise the bar a skosh each time. This year’s card was a slight exception, because I used the same folding 3D framework as my 2023-24 design, but with a new theme, color scheme and technical features.
It’s probably obvious that this year’s card is is a nod to the Beatles’ iconic Abbey Road album cover, and I specifically chose this theme to honor a beloved friend we lost this past June. Among other things, my friend Bruce and I shared a mutual love for all things Beatles. For as long as I can remember, my favorite album has been Revolver, but Bruce (whom we all called BT) insisted that the only “objectively” correct choice for greatest album ever made – Beatles or otherwise – is Abbey Road. It still makes me smile when I think about it. I started designing this card the same week I learned about his unexpected passing, and every aspect of it – the theme, the colors, the music, and even (perhaps especially) the messaging – was selected in his memory.
The Figma template I drew and exported to Cricut for cutting. The framework has the same dimensions as my 2023 card, which made production a bit easier.
Production-wise, this one was a bit easier than most of my previous cards to get up and running, since I based its ‘architecture’ on my 2023-24 card design. As a result, I didn’t have to go through too much trial-and-error building physical prototypes to ensure all the pieces fit together when assembled, since I nailed down the technical specifications two years go. The 2023-24 card featured LED lighting, but for this new version I wanted to feature a different wrinkle – music – so I worked with a manufacturer on Alibaba to customize a sound module for my needs. Most off-the-shelf sound modules will play audio repeatedly when you open a card, but I wanted my music to play just once and stop, unless you reopen it – so it could sit open on a shelf without making a racket. It turns out this was a fairly common request, and they were able to accommodate. The song I chose is a music box version of Abbey Road‘s “Here Comes the Sun,” to offer a tone of hopefulness after experiencing a period of despair.
About a month after the sound modules arrived, I started the design production and built a working protoype. But then I had a little change of heart: the addition of music was nice, but now I ALSO wanted the card to light up like the last one. If you’re interested, I documented the steps I took to hack lighting into its design in my previous post (nerd alert!).
Anyway, I’m in the final stages of assembling all the cards now, and will be sending them out in a few weeks. I’m already starting to think about what I want to do for next year’s design. But this one’s for you, BT.