A family tradition, reinvented

We're a family-run studio. Two humans, two French bulldogs and a lot of coffee. Dawn and Antony run the whole thing from the spare room, the kitchen table, or wherever there's bench space for a laptop and two snoring dogs.

Everything you see here is made by us. No venture capital. No outsourced content team. Just a family who's been drawing silly cards for each other for longer than we'd like to admit, and one day decided the rest of the world should have a way to do it too.

It all started with stick figures. Two dots for eyes, a wobbly mouth, a single prop to give the joke away. A fishing rod. A guitar. A pair of skis. Nobody in the family was a trained artist. That was the whole point. The cards were funny becausethey were terrible, and you could always tell how much effort someone had put in by how long they'd spent on the hands.

Open a drawer in our house and you'll still find a shoebox of them. Birthdays from the 90s. Christmases from before the doggos were born. A stick figure of Dad stuck in a lift. The card outlived the gift every single time.

Somewhere along the way the stick figures got shoulders. Then faces. Then backgrounds. A single-panel cartoon turned into a three-panel comic strip, and a three-panel comic turned into a folded-out mini graphic novel that retold the entire year. The card stopped being a card and started being a keepsake.

This is the era we all got a bit competitive. Who could cram the most in-jokes onto one A5 page? Who could get a proper laugh out loud before the present was even open? The effort kept climbing. So did the wait time. Some cards took an entire weekend.

Then the models got good. The first time we used AI on a family birthday card was for Dawn's dad, Jeff. He'd just bought himself a brand new Harley Davidson that year and hadn't stopped talking about it since, so we made him a postcard of the thing he loved most. Jeff riding the new Harley past every local landmark in his town, like a proper biker road movie.

But the bit that made Jeff actually well up wasn't the AI image. It was Dawn's handwriting sitting front and centre across the top of the card. Her loopy, familiar scrawl, the same way she'd been writing his birthday messages since she was a kid. That was the moment we knew the rule. The digital bit could change, but the personal bit had to stay in a human hand.

The room went quiet when he opened it. This was the thing we'd been trying to draw for 15 years, and now the drawing was done in 30 seconds. The tradition stayed. The in-jokes, the embarrassing moments, the year-in-one-image idea. The only thing that changed was the hand holding the pencil.

Images were the jump. Motion was the moment it became something else entirely. The first time we turned a still portrait of one of the doggos into a 5-second cinematic, him strutting through a disco like he owned the place, that was the moment we looked at each other and said, "other people need this."

A hand-drawn card makes you smile. A moving, talking, AI-scored card makes you text three people immediately. We wanted everyone else to have the same reaction we had that night at the kitchen table.