You could buy a pre-made print card, pick out an animated eCard, download a built-in card template in Word, or make your own card. Every holiday, the same choices present themselves, and the latter option always sounds the best but looks the most unattractive once you try to make something actually look nice with Word's pre-made text art. Yet, it doesn't have to be that hard to make beautiful word art in Word.

In this tutorial, I will show you how to design a beautiful Mother's Day card in Microsoft Word from scratch. We will only use predefined shapes, default colors and standard tools. The background of the card may look complicated, but after I will show you a special trick to tweak the flower shape, you will find out that it is actually pretty easy.

In the next few minutes, you'll go from a blank page in Word to your own copy of the card above, and you can tweak that with the colors and more that you want to make it your own. Ready?

What You'll Need:

You'll need a recent copy of Microsoft Word on your computer; this tutorial uses Word 2013 for PC, but you should be able to follow along with minor differences in any Word 2007 for PC or Word 2008 for Mac or newer. Then, you'll also need the Hero font, which you can download for free from Fontfabric. However, if you do not want to install this font, you can use any other font you have installed on your computer or a built-in Word font instead.

This tutorial has all the steps you need to turn a blank document into this fully complete card, but if you'd like to download the template and just tweak it yourself, you'll find a download link with the completed Word file from the Download Attachment button in the sidebar on the right. You could then preview and print the card from Word Online, but do note that Word Online doesn't have enough features to make or edit this card in your browser.

Setting Up a Document

Now we're ready to start making a Mother's Day card. Start with a blank document (Ctrl-N), and jump to the Page Layout ribbon. There, change the Size to A5, as an A4 or Letter sized card would look over-sized.

While you are on this ribbon, also change the Orientation to Landscape.

The Flower Shape

Since the flower is used not only over the “O” letter, but also for the background, let´s start with this element. Select the ribbon Insert > Shapes > Rounded Rectangle…

…and draw the rounded rectangle somewhere in the document. The size is not very important right now, but drag the yellow handle all the way to the right to make the corners as rounded as possible. We want it to have a pill-like shape.

Keep the object selected, open the Format ribbon, and change the Shape Outline to No Outline. Select Shape Fill > More Colors, and in the Colors dialog, select a light orange color from the Standard swatches.

One shape alone is not enough to form a flower. Duplicate it two more times by either dragging it with a Ctrl key pressed, or use the well-known shortcuts Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V. We want to have a flower with six petals, that is 360° / 6 = 60° for each petal. For this reason, the second shape should be rotated by 60°, and the third one by 120°. When rotating the shape, keep the Shift key pressed, it will automatically snap to 15° increments. All the three shapes could look like this.

Aligning those three objects by eye is possible, but using a specialized align function is much faster. Select all three shapes with a Shift key pressed, open the Format ribbon and select Align > Align Center, and again Align > Align Middle.

Depending on the rounded rectangle shape size, your flower may look a little bit different. Maybe it is too thin, or maybe it is too bold. There is a way to adjust the shape, but don't just drag the resize handles. As the screenshot below shows, this ruins the shape.

Instead, to quickly change the shape, use the keyboard shortcuts. A Shift key together with the arrow keys changes the object size. Up and down arrow keys adjusts the height, left and right arrow keys adjusts the width. Because our three objects are not inside the group, but are selected individually, those keyboard shortcuts will change the size of each object separately, while keeping the right alignment.

You can try it on your own—select all three object with a Shift key pressed, and press for example Shift + Left arrow key several times. The petals of our flower should become much thinner as shown on the screenshot below.

Adding MOM Text With Flower

Before adding a text, we can add a splash of a color to the boring white background. Jump to the Design ribbon, and select Page Color > More Colors. In the Colors dialog, select a light pink color from the Standard swatches.

Select ribbon Insert > Shapes > Text Box…

…and draw a new text box, almost as wide as a page. Change the font to Hero Light, font size to 200 pt, and type in “MOM”. Set the text alignment to Center (Ctrl-E), and use the Font Color drop-down menu to select More Colors, and set a very light yellow text color. It is almost invisible over the white text box background color, but not for long.

Select the Format ribbon, and change the Shape Outline to No Outline and Shape Fill to No Fill. That way, the text box becomes transparent and the only visible thing is the content—the word MOM. As you can see, the flower is placed almost in the right spot, but that is just an accident.

Right click over the text box border and select Send to Back to send this text box below the previously drawn flower.

It may also be a good idea to select the flower shapes, and move them away for now. After that, select ribbon Insert > Shapes > Oval, and draw an oval over the “O” letter. It does not have to be perfect, and in fact, the shape could be even bigger than the “O” letter. If you want better precision, do not forget to zoom-in before drawing the shape.

Keep the oval selected and in the Format ribbon, change the Shape Outline to No Outline and Shape Fill to the color of the text. This swatch should be in the Recent Colors, and it's best to select it from there to make sure your colors are consistent throughout the card.

Select the three flower shapes and move them over this oval. Because the oval was drawn as a last shape, it is over the flower. You have to right click the flower shapes and select Bring to Front to have the correct z-order and display the flower on top.

Once you've done that, this is how it should look:

To add a center part to the flower, draw a new Oval from the Insert > Shapes dropdown. Keep the Shift key pressed during the drawing to draw a circle. As usual, change the Shape Outline to No Outline, and for the Shape Fill, select a darker orange color.

Adding a Second Line Of Text

We need another text box for a second line of text. Insert it via Insert > Shapes > Text Box and draw it somewhere below the first line, then type in “Happy Mother's Day!”. Change the font to Hero, size 45 pt, Center aligned, and change the color to some light orange color using the Font Color drop-down menu.

Keep the text box selected and in the Format ribbon, change the Shape Outline to No Outline and Shape Fill to No Fill. That way, only the text will be visible, not the borders or background of the text box. Optionally, tweak the text box position with the mouse or with the arrow keys to make sure the first and the last characters are optically aligned with the “M” letters.

And this is how it could look. If you want, you can stop right now and call it quits—even this will look nicer than the average built-in card template. If you still have energy, though, feel free to continue to the second part of the tutorial where we'll decorate the background with more flowers, add a border, and more.

A Flower Background

Because we will be working with a lot of objects in this section, it is a good idea to show a Selection Pane—open this from the Home ribbon by clicking the Select > Selection Pane command.

As the screenshot shows, we have two text boxes, the oval over the M letter, rounded rectangles (flower), and the oval over the flower. Select those three rounded rectangles in the document space or in the Selection Pane, and duplicate them with the Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V shortcuts. The alignment will be broken after you paste those objects.

Use the Format > Align drop-down menu to align them properly. To focus only on the background and not on the foreground elements, click over the eye icons in the Selection Pane to hide everything except those three last-pasted rounded rectangles.

The flowers on the background should be really subtle, so use the Format ribbon > Shape Fill > More Colors to set the fill color very similar to the background.

Copy and paste those three shapes several times, align them properly using the Align dropdown menu and use the Shift + arrow keys shortcuts to change the flower shapes. Because there will be the text in the middle, try to keep the flowers mostly around the edges of the document.

Optionally, we can also add stems to some of them. Draw a Line from the Insert > Shapes dropdown menu. Keep the Shift key pressed during the drawing to draw a straight line.

Use the Shape Outline dropdown menu to not only set the line Weight…

…but also the color and optionally the Dashes. Not every flower needs a stem, so less is more in this case.

A Border Around The Page

The last part of the background is the light border around the page. Draw a wide Rectangle from the Insert > Shapes dropdown menu, and draw it wider than the page.

Select ribbon Format > Align to Page, open this dropdown again and select Align Top and Align Center.

Duplicate this rectangle, align it to the bottom of the page, than duplicate it again and rotate it by 90° by dragging the rotation handle together with the Shift key pressed.

Align this rectangle to the Left, duplicate it again and align it to the Right.

Finally select all four rectangles with a Shift key pressed and set the Shape Outline to No Outline and Shape Fill to the same light pink color as is used for the flower shapes, again by picking it from the Recent Colors list.

Putting It All Together

The background is finished, and we can unhide the previously hidden objects. In the Selection Pane, click over the hidden objects, which will make them visible again. You do not even have to click over the eye icon. Select all the foreground elements with a Shift key pressed, and drag them inside the Selection Pane all the way to the top.

That will move them over the background.

You may notice that some of the background shapes are overlapping the text too much, and it may be better to move them a little bit off. Use the Selection Pane to select those shapes and press the arrow keys several times to move them away.

The Last Touch

The very last touch is a stem for the main “O” flower. Open the Insert > Shapes dropdown menu and select Arc.

Drag the yellow handles to change the arc size and rotate it in a way that it does not overlap the second line of text. For a precise control of the shape, work in a zoomed-in view.

Finally set the right outline color, and that's it! Your card is now finished, ready to be printed or exported as an image to send as an eCard.

Conclusion

Making a beautifully unique card in Word is actually easier than it looks. With a few tweaks to the built-in shape and typography tools, you can make a card that looks so nice, you'd assume it'd require Photoshop or Illustrator skills.

You can use these ideas combined with our tutorial on making beautiful Word art to make your own customized cards for any special event in the future. Be sure to share the designs you come up with, or leave any questions you may have while working, in the comments below!