Cards of Christmas Past
Click on the cards to see enlarged	1981 Made from an IBM service bureau punched card it proved quite a challenge to duplicate. Real cards have no more than three holes per column and this was all the punch machine could manage without making funny noises. The cards were originally used to program computers, one line of program per card. It was a huge pain if you dropped the deck
	1982 About the only way to produce graphical output at the time was to use a pen plotter. The pen was held in a large machine and moved over the paper (or sometimes the pen was moved). The drawing was created using a printed circuit layout system. Computer graphics tools were very crude at that time.
	1983 This card was produced in the same way as the last one but featured a computer generated poem. The program used to create the poem appeared on the back of the card. Click here to see it.
	1984 Producing realistic images on computers of the day was not easy. This card was painstakingly digitized line by line from a photograph I took near my house in Edinburgh on a snowy day.
	1985 This card was plotted on a transparency. The design is based on a program that morphs one shape into another. A curiosity though was that the transparent card was almost invisible when put on a shelf (click here). I think my Mum got some kind of prize for the most original Christmas card from her women's group!
	1986 I'd been struggling for a while to design a computer program to display projected 3D images. It turned out to be much more difficult to realize in vector graphics than I realized (most modern solutions are based on calculating pixel overlays).
	1987 This was the first card based on pixel graphics, as all subsequent ones would be. Software tools available were very crude so the card design pretty much had to be designed pixel by pixel. I got a lot of help from my friend Jean-Luc Addams. It was printed on HP's first InkJet printer.
	1988 Laser printers were becoming available at this time, but image sources were more of a problem. Writing programs to produce interesting patterns was a choice employed here. The design is based on a Hilbert space filling curve, a fractal design that can be modified to occupy an arbitrarily large space. The letters were inserted into the design manually.
	1989 The inspiration for this pattern comes from Celtic knot patterns. I wrote a program to produce pictures of them based on a very fine book on the subject by Iain Bain.
	1990 This card is a computer generated maze. As some people discovered it is a real puzzle that can be solved. The "Happy Xmas" design was inserted into the maze before putting in the other walls.
	1991 Consumer image scanners were appearing on the market for the first time although I was still stuck with the laser printer for output. I posed as Santa Claus myself, complete with a glass of sherry and a mince pie. I think you can really only recognize me from the glasses.
	1992 By the time this card was made I was working in HP's San Diego printer division and had access to color inkjet printers, even if the colors were a bit on the acid side by today's standards. Many of the following cards were printed on ink-jet printers of one type or another. San Diego's year round beach climate was the inspiration for the design of the card.
	1993 Consumer imaging was coming together by this time and it was possible to combine the scanned photo with clip art. The design was printed on a large format color inkjet plotter, which while overkill did make the production easy!
	1994 This card was real funny. Santa and his reindeer were printed on a transparency. The concertina design lets it stand out in front of the background so they appear to be flying over downtown LA. Sadly the transparency was not very stable and the ink has bled somewhat over the years.
	1995 Adobe Photoshop was used to create this fanciful view of my house in San Diego in the snow (it never snows in San Diego, it's too warm). I like the snow on the palm trees. I appear in a picture with Luis inside.
	1996 The picture is a 3D stereogram. Each card had a pair of red-green glasses inside to enable viewing. Inside was a color version which needed a rather harder cross-eyed viewing technique. Not many people were able to see it but if you want to try it is the picture on the right.
	1997 The card is tiny and contains a fridge magnet of me with a picture of Luis and myself. I'd been to Japan around this time and was fascinated by the sticker printing machines that were invading arcades across the country. We found a machine in San Diego. The magnets came from a craft store and were stuck on by hand.
	1998 Some of the best designs were the ones I came up with in a hurry. I'd just moved to Taiwan and started working in Ulead Systems. It was created using their PhotoImpact computer graphics product. The Chinese just says "Happy Christmas". Rabbits appear on the edges of the card because 1999 was Chinese Year of the Rabbit.
	1999 Yours truly once again this time posing as Santa on his scooter sleigh. Scooters are endemic in Taiwan so its quite appropriate. Rudolph is a glove puppet. The background is Taiwan Taroko Gorge.
	2000 Recipients of the 2000 card had to follow instructions on the back of the paper to fold it into a small Christmas tree. My friend Steve Hoole kindly sent me a picture of himself to show he managed it...
	2001 The background is from a painting in the National Palace Museum in Taipei. Little Christmas figures have been inserted into the painting. You can read the full story of this card and how it was made here.
	2002 This was one of my all time favorites. The card was made using Microsoft's Visual Studio, a computer software design system, in the style of a Windows program dialog box. The little message box appears inside. Click on the images to view full size
	2003 Most mechanical things are designed today using CAD software. These 3D graphics packages allow you to create, assemble, and view a wide variety of mechanical parts without having to go into the shop and make anything. For real designs it has to be possible to realize the design using actual tools, but in the computer model you can let your imagination run a little wilder. So here I have drilled, milled, bent and extruded some more fanciful shapes.
	2004 I'd spent too much time in China so this card was a bit of a rush job, nevertheless it turned out pretty good. The stone statues are wind lions from the Taiwanese island of Kinmen Read the full story here.
	2005 This card was inspired by work in China manufacturing plants. Everyone is always dressed the same. They don't wear Santa outfits; they were put on in Photoshop. Jimmy posed with the hat and then it was cloned into the picture. The original clothes were yellow, not red.
	2006 Here we are 25 years later. The first five pictures depict various high-tech activities: Planning & management, electronic engineering, mechanical engineering, computer science, and optics. The last one is just the printing. This is the first of my cards that was printed photographically rather than with a personal printer.
	2007 Some of the Chinese Zodiac animals don't make for very cute decorations (Snake especially), but Year of the Rat is a lot of fun. Here I am in full rat gear, except it's a Photoshop job of course.
	2008 In many East Asian countries people and companies use a personal seal stamp to verify their identity, rather than using a signature. The stamps are based on a stylized form of an archaic Chinese script. Looks closely and you might see both English and Chinese for "Merry Christmas" Read the full story here.
	2009 An online farming craze hit the world this year. The card shows my FarmVille farm arranged for Christmas. It was not possible to get all the crops ready at the same time so I had to montage things a bit.
	2010 A little homage to the iPhone/iPod here. The card shows the phone with a selection of Christmas applications and things related to next year’s Chinese year of the rabbit. In addition a few popular applications appear like the addictive “Angry Birds” game, “Trainyard” puzzle which is highly recommended by me, “Farmville” application (see 2009’s card), and “Grindr” which uses the GPS of the phone to locate nearby gay hookups.
	2011 The design of this card was inspired by achievement tables that track milestones in PC and handheld games. This one was based on Angry Birds. Often games keep these data in the cloud (online) so you will always be able to access your progress and compare it to other peoples. How does your average Christmas score?