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Design tool · Printable cards

Turn a family saying into a card worth keeping

Type the saying, a plain-English gloss and where you heard it, then pick one of four print-safe designs. A6 to US Letter, one card or eight to a sheet with crop marks, a greyscale check, and a PNG or SVG download — all in this tab, with nothing uploaded.

Four designs print-safeSix palettes ink on paperA6 to Letter 1 to 8 a sheetPNG + SVG 300 DPI ready

1 · The saying

the headline

2 · Example sayings

fills the form

Every example is a traditional saying that circulated for generations with no single author, so the attribution names a family or a place instead of a person.

3 · Gloss and attribution

all optional
A person, a place or a generation. This is the attribution, so keep it to who kept the saying rather than who invented it.

4 · Design

Card design
Palette

5 · Paper and output

Cards per sheet
The sheet is the paper size above. Several cards on one sheet share the page, so each one prints smaller.

The card front

100 %

All four designs

same words, four voices

Each design is drawn with the site's own type stack and two colours, so all four stay legible on a black-and-white printer.

How to use Folklore Card Maker

Everything below runs in this tab. Nothing is uploaded, and no account is needed.

Step by step

  1. Type the saying into The saying. The counter turns amber past ninety characters, because a long headline has to shrink or wrap further.
  2. Add the gloss, where you heard it, a category and a when-to-use line in Gloss and attribution. Only the saying itself is required.
  3. Pick a design, a palette and a type scale. Turn on rounded corners, choose a rule or an ornament, and add the second page if the gloss and the attribution deserve their own side.
  4. Choose the paper and how many cards go on a sheet, then check the layout in greyscale and at a comfortable zoom. The caption tells you the printed size of each card.
  5. Print the sheet, or download the PNG, the SVG or the card text. Everything happens in this tab.

Details and limits

A saying becomes folklore when nobody owns it

The line between a family saying and somebody's joke is ownership. Once a saying is repeated by people who cannot name the author, it belongs to the family, the street or the trade that kept it, and the honest attribution is the place you heard it rather than a person. If you do know who wrote it and they are still alive, credit them by name, date it, and do not print it as folklore.

Margins, and why 3 mm matters

A printer trims a sheet with a few millimetres of drift, so text that runs to the edge can lose a letter on one side. Every design here keeps its type behind a 3 mm safe line and never lets it touch the trim. If you want colour to run off the edge of the card, the background has to extend 3 mm past the trim, and that needs a printer who can print to the edge — a desktop printer leaves a white border whatever you do.

Greyscale is the honest test

Every palette is two colours, an ink and a paper, and every rule and ornament is drawn in the same ink rather than in a second hue. That is what keeps a card safe on a mono office printer, on a photocopier and on the cheapest card stock. The greyscale toggle desaturates the whole card, ornament included. If a card only reads because cream is warmer than bone, it does not read.

The PNG is a grid, the SVG is a drawing

The PNG is a raster image sized to 300 DPI, about 1240 × 1749 pixels for an A6 card. It prints sharply at the size it was made for and goes soft if you enlarge it. The SVG keeps the geometry and the words as vectors, so it stays sharp at any size and can be edited in a vector program, but it names the site's font stack, so the exact letterforms depend on which fonts are installed where it is opened.

Read the guide on household folklore · Read the guide on pixels, DPI and print size · Install for offline use

Frequently asked questions

How do I print a card?

Fill in the saying, choose a paper size and how many cards go on a sheet, then press Print the sheet. The print view drops every button and panel and prints only the layout, with crop marks between the cards. Print at 100 % scale with no fit-to-page setting, or the millimetre sizes will be wrong.

What size should I choose?

A6 for a card that fits a pocket or a recipe box, A5 for something to frame, 4 × 6 in if you have a photo printer, and US Letter when you want one large page. One card per sheet prints at full size; two, four or eight per sheet scale the cards down to fit, and the caption tells you the printed size before you commit.

Can I share a digital card?

Yes. The PNG is the one to send in a message or attach to an email, the SVG is the one to put on a website or hand to a printer, and Copy the card text gives you the words as plain text for a document or a post. Nothing is uploaded from this page, so sharing is entirely your choice.

How do I attribute a family saying?

Attribute it to the family, the place or the generation that kept it: heard from my grandmother in Co. Kerry, or a saying from the fishing families of the Avalon Peninsula. That is the honest attribution for a saying with no author. Name a living person only if they actually coined it, and say so.

Does it work in black and white?

Yes. Every design uses two colours, an ink and a paper, with rules and ornaments drawn in the same ink instead of a second hue. Tick Check in greyscale to see the card as a mono printer would. If a card stops reading in greyscale, darken the ink or lighten the paper until it reads again.

Is anything uploaded?

No. The card is drawn on a canvas and built as SVG inside this tab, the PNG is produced by your own browser, and no network request is made after the page loads. Nothing is stored either: closing the tab discards the form, so copy or download anything you want to keep.