Graduation, Promotions & New Beginnings

Achievement cards are the easiest to write badly because the obvious move — "congratulations on your accomplishment!" — is exactly the kind of generic line the recipient has heard a hundred times that week. The wording on every card in this category is built around the opposite move: name the specific thing, name what it took, and skip the filler. That is the difference between a card that gets read once and a card that gets pinned to a corkboard.

Inside this category you'll find 8 distinct occasion pages, each one with curated wording samples in three lengths, a design-tip block calibrated to the occasion's tone, and a printable template preview sized for standard 5×7 card stock. Sender-craft enthusiasts may also enjoy our companion reading list on stationery and correspondence — a quiet handful of resources we return to when building this category.

The defining quality of the cards in Graduation, Promotions & New Beginnings is what we call tonal restraint: every front-of-card design is opinionated about its visual direction, but every interior is left meaningfully blank. The mood across the category is confident, specific, never overdone, and the palette below is the working color system we draw from when designing new templates for these occasions.