Every card front on this site starts as an AI-generated illustration.
We'd rather tell you that plainly than have you work it out. What follows is what that does and doesn't mean, because the generating is the quick part. The rest is the bit that decides whether a card is worth sending.
Made for one breed, not for dogs in general
Every illustration is generated for a single named breed. Not a generic dog with a breed name attached afterwards.
That means the ears, the coat, the build and the expression belong to that breed. It means a liver and white Springer isn't the same card as a black and white one. It means a Cockapoo doesn't get a Poodle's coat because the two are near enough.
Owners spot a wrong dog instantly. That's the standard the artwork has to clear.
Every image fades to pure white
A Dogsday card is 5×7 portrait, and the illustration has to end somewhere.
So every image fades out to pure white. No border, no frame, no seam, no grey edge where the picture stops and the card starts. The dog sits on the page and the page stays clean.
Every image is checked against that before it becomes a card. There are no exceptions to it.
Sympathy cards are never worded by AI
On every other occasion you can ask our AI for a draft and edit it, or ignore it and write your own.
On sympathy cards it doesn't run at all. It's switched off.
Some things aren't for an algorithm to guess at. If someone's dog has died, the words should come from a person — so you write them yourself. No card is ever signed by the dog on a sympathy card either.
It would be easier to leave the AI switched on. We'd rather it wasn't.
Printed and posted by hand, in England
Your card isn't sent to a fulfilment warehouse.
It's printed here, on 300gsm card, at 5×7 with a matching envelope. Folded, packed and posted by the same person who runs the shop, and dispatched within one working day.
That's a smaller operation than most card shops, and it's the reason the printing gets looked at rather than counted.
That's the whole process, start to finish.
If a card ever turns up not as you expected it, tell us — you've got 14 days and we'll refund it.