Production constraints are design constraints

3 kids × (26 classmates + 2 teachers + 4 TAs) = 96 handmade Valentine’s Day cards.

Last night the kids hauled out the Big Art Box to start making Valentine’s Day cards. Yo, kiddos, have you considered…

96 cards × 5min/card = 8hrs

Sure, we’ll split three ways (five including parents), but that’s still 2–3 hours of our mortal lives we’re gonna spend on this.

So I fired up the old Drawin’ Computer and started Computer Drawin’ … but after about 30min I realized I was about to replace their 3 hours of labor with my 3 hours of labor.

Which was when we decided to get really creative. We picked a dozen appropriate emojis (🥰😜😍😘😎🤓😻😺🐰🦄🤣🐼) and a cool font. I blew the emojis up to 100 points and laid out a dozen Valentine’s Day cards per page along with a really simple message (“Happy Valentine’s Day…from [kid’s name]”). We tacked on [kid’s name] in the template so they would have that much less to write when we distributed 100 freakin’ Valentine’s day cards.

Of course we were out of red construction paper.

And yellow toner.

So I slapped a pure magenta Hue blending layer over the whole shebang and made purple emoji Valentine’s Day Cards. We used the paper cutter at the neighborhood FedEx store to slice them all up, which saved us probably most of the labor. We glued the emojis to pink, magenta, and purple construction paper and voilà!

I tried to write this blog post faster than we made those cards, I’m not sure I succeeded.