Best Fishes and Twenty Years of Holiday Thinking

Original Vector Illustration

Holiday messages are strange little time capsules. They arrive once a year, stay for a moment, then disappear. And yet when you look back, they tell a surprisingly honest story about how design thinking evolves. I have been creating holiday messages for over twenty years now, and when I line them all up, the loud ones fade first. The quiet ones tend to stay.

One of my favorites came from a collaboration with the Monterey Bay Aquarium. It was not a campaign. It was not complicated. It was an e card. Simple illustration, simple idea, simple joy. A wreath made entirely of fish, swimming in a perfect loop, tied together with a red bow. The line read Best Fishes for a Happy Holiday Season.

That was it.

No heavy copy. No overworked message. Just a visual idea that trusted the viewer to smile and move on with their day a little lighter. The fish formed a reef like circle, alive and in motion, which felt exactly right for an organization built around the ocean. The pun was gentle. The illustration did the work.

What I loved then and still love now is how little it tried to impress. It understood that holiday design does not need to shout. It needs to connect. The card respected attention instead of demanding it. You opened it, smiled, and closed it. Mission accomplished.

Looking back over two decades of holiday work, that piece reminds me why restraint matters. Why clarity matters. Why a single good idea will always outlast layers of decoration. Design at its best does not explain itself. It just feels right.

The Monterey Bay Aquarium card still feels right to me. A circle of fish, a bow, a quiet joke, and a moment of kindness sent through a screen. After twenty years of holiday messages, that feels like a pretty good definition of success.

Casella Creative continues to chase that feeling every season. Less noise. More meaning. And the occasional good pun when it earns its place.