The mention of designing company Christmas cards can cause groans among designers as the end of the year approaches. We avoid this by using ours as a chance to experiment. For 2022 we harnessed the power of Stable Diffusion and the Lex AI chat tool to create imagery and personalised jokes for our Christmas card list.

The idea

We wanted to bring an old Christmas tradition up to date with the use of AI tools. The tone is intended to be tongue in cheek, so we imagined what a virtual Christmas cracker joke would look like inside a Sharp Sharp supercomputer. The styling and typography is intentionally slightly retro sci-fi, a nod to the fact that AI tools are less than perfect at present.

How we did it

The Lex interface looks like a simple word processor. However if you tap the ‘Ask Lex’ icon, a chat window pops up where you can interact with the AI and ask for its input. We fed it some information from our contacts’ websites, and instructed it to write a selection of Christmas-themed jokes, and included details of the job type and industry sectors of our contacts in order to personalise them.

The results were mixed to say the least, though we believe this added to their charm, as Christmas cracker jokes are traditionally so corny anyway.

We then used Stable Diffusion to generate a background image for the cracker joke to be placed onto.

Finally, we used Photoshop to write the jokes onto the background images before emailing them to our contacts.

The response? We got a few groans and a few more chuckles, and there was a general appreciation at our personalised approach. We look forward to putting AI tools to more serious (and silly) uses on future projects - please get in touch if you’d like to hear more.