107 Incredible Postcard Designs to Inspire Your Creativity

There’s one little secret every print designer needs to know: with the right design, postcards are arguably the most effective form of print marketing for businesses. People don’t throw them away as often as other direct mail, and the most creative postcards live on as collectible artwork. Many of us hang them on the fridge, display them on memory boards or paste them into scrapbooks.

When designing custom postcards for your clients, keep this “second life” in mind and strive to create something people will cherish for years. Of course, obtaining design immortality is easier said than done, so we’ve rounded up some of our favorite postcard designs to give you some fresh ideas.

Create your own stunning postcard design with help from the professional graphic designers on our print design services team.

College and University Postcards

Postcards make a lot of sense for promoting college and universities because they can be easily distributed to their target audience. They can be circulated by hand, placed around campus, pinned to bulletin boards or mailed directly to students, their parents and alumni. College and university postcards usually reflect the fun, youthful energy of student life.

MSU Arts Weekend

St. Michael’s College

Design and Branding Postcards

For people and companies that specialize in the visual arts, branded postcards don’t just promote the company—they often serve as an example of the actual product, especially for graphic designers who create their own self-promotions. These postcards help to publicize those who excel in one or more areas of design, including fashion, illustration, and visual branding.

Cascade Financial Management

Emma Mosier Illustrated Postcard

Loulou & Tummie

Event Postcards

Postcards are a great, easy way to advertise for a special event or festival. As an added bonus, they act as a take-away souvenir for the event itself. Postcards don’t have enough canvas space to go into too much detail about the event, so these designs typically focus on the main selling points – who, what, where and when – to provide a snapshot of the event as a whole.

Prinewood Film Festival

Yes No Reason

Museum Postcards

We’re not talking about the postcards you find in a museum’s gift shop—these are the postcard designs that compel you to visit the museum in the first place. Since museums often have special events or temporary exhibits, postcards make for a smart marketing choice because they’re cheap and easy to make. Likewise, many people hold onto their museum postcards as a memento of their experiences, since most museums frown on photography.

Boonshoft Museum

Museum of the Moving Image

Non-Profit Postcards

Postcards are just one of the many ways that nonprofit groups drum up awareness for their causes. The medium is accessible and affordable, allowing organizations to spread their message far and wide. Non-profit postcard designs tend to tug at the heartstrings, giving the audience an emotional reason as to why they should care.

Race Against Violence

Sonya Postcard 2014

Real Estate Postcards

The real estate industry uses postcards as a way to connect to the people looking to buy or sell property, but creating print media for this field can be tricky. If the brand is selling a large quantity of spaces in one location, then the postcard can focus on the location or property itself. However, since it’s not cost effective to print up a bunch of postcards to sell just one building or home, many real estate postcards will instead promote the company selling the properties or focus on recently sold homes as an example of what the real estate agent typically deals with.

Baezley Real Estate

Coast & Country Realty

Spectrum Realty

Save the Date Postcards

When you think of save the date postcards, you probably immediately think of weddings—but these useful reminders have been in existence well before the wedding industry got ahold of them. Save the dates are a sort of informal invitation, a way to let people know that something is out on the horizon. They’re often used by your clients to promote upcoming business events or sales, and are typically followed by a more formal or detailed invitation. This means that they work best when they’re simple and to the point.

2012 Cornerstone Annual Golf Tournament

Sneakin’ & Sippin’ at the Speakeasy

Travel Postcards

When you travel, you might end up sending some postcards back home to your friends and loved ones—but the places you travel to (and the agencies that get you there) often use postcards to get you to embark in the first place. Both types of postcards have similar design goals—to capture the feeling of the location and entice people to come.

5 Star Travel

Killington Mountain

Potawatomi Hotel & Casino

Eclectic Promotional and Branded Postcards

Designers are doing a lot of interesting things with postcards and finding plenty of different uses for the medium. In fact, many of the designs we found simply defied categorization. These creative postcards might give you a spark of inspiration to find your own unique design ideas.

Emirates Pop-up Postcard

Tunisia 2014

Send us your thoughts

Which of these postcards did you like the best and which ones would you leave out of your scrapbook? What kind of cool postcards have you held onto over the years? We want to hear what you have to say on the subject, so leave us a comment below with your ideas, opinions and pictures of postcards.