Build a postcard design experience for personal moments and marketing campaigns alike
An embeddable postcard design SDK for photo postcards, direct mail campaigns, travel cards, and promotional mailers.
Deployable on web, iOS, Android, and server, without building or maintaining the design layer yourself.
Trusted by 100+ industry leaders
Integrating IMG.LY’s editor meant we didn’t have to build or maintain a complex editing layer ourselves. That kept our team focused on our core AI ad engine and saved us countless development hours — while still giving our customers the ability to polish and customize creatives at scale.
Hikari Senju
CEO, Omneky
With IMG.LY we built a central creative portal that now powers over 140 dealer campaigns across multiple automotive brands. Before this, asset creation was slow and inconsistent.
Martin Röhr
Product Owner, Digitas
By embedding IMG.LY’s editor we were able to hit key RFP requirements and deliver a template-based creative experience that now serves 1,000+ customers. It helped us win more deals and exceed enterprise expectations without needing to hire dedicated design teams.
Rob Driscoll
Director of PM, Optimizely
Since integrating IMG.LY’s editor, we now deliver 30,000+ ad creatives per month, dramatically shorten time-to-launch, and help our clients cut design spend by up to $10,000 per month.
Logan Welbaum
Founder, Plai
Our customers create over a million personalized postcards each year choosing from over hundreds of templates with IMG.LY’s SDK. It’s the only solution that allows us to build our own specialized, on-brand UI that integrates seamlessly with our platform.
Jeanine Zaalberg
Product Manager, SwissPost
From a developer’s perspective, the most powerful feature of the photo editor is the integration process. It was completely flawless, quick, and easy to integrate.
Stefano Fornari
CTO, Funambol
We compared IMG.LY SDK with other solutions and found that it would be the best fit for us since it provides all the features that are crucial for our use case.
Carem Pereira
SCRUM Manager, HP
Built for platforms where postcards serve both individual senders and marketing teams
Give every sender a design that feels considered
Defined front and back zones, photo areas, and text fields let any sender produce a postcard that looks intentional, without design experience or print know-how.
Handle the back of the card as carefully as the front
Address blocks, postage areas, and legal zones stay structurally defined and locked. Customers personalise the front. The back stays correct by default.
Generate campaign volumes without manual repetition
Connect templates to a data source and generate personalised variations at scale. Direct mail campaigns, promotional mailers, and event follow-ups from one approved design.
Key capabilities
For your users
Make it personal with a photo and a message.
Photo upload, in-editor cropping, font choices, and text layout give customers the tools to make a postcard that feels like it came from them, not from a template.
Know it will print correctly before ordering.
Validation warnings surface inside the editor as customers work. What they approve reflects the finished card, without surprises after delivery.
For your platform
Front and back zone management per format.
Define creative zones and locked production elements separately per card format. Address blocks, postage areas, and legal clearance zones stay structurally protected regardless of what customers do on the front.
Variable data for campaign personalisation.
Tag name, address, offer code, or any field as a variable inside the template. Connect a data source and generate unique personalised cards at campaign volume via the headless API.
Bleed, spot colour, and PDF/X export per format.
Print production settings configured at the template level and enforced at export across individual orders and bulk batches, without manual intervention per output.
Design validation during the creation session.
Bleed violations, resolution failures, and out-of-bounds elements are caught inside the editor before the order is placed, when fixing them costs nothing.
How to integrate the postcard editor
Four steps from a sender flow to print-ready postcards, single or batch.
Embed the editor
Start from the postcard starter kit and you are looking at a working editor in minutes. If your campaign builder needs different controls or your brand needs different chrome, every part is customizable.
Open Theming Demo
Templates for personal and branded use cases
Design any number of postcard templates with placeholder zones, locked brand elements, and front and back zone definitions configured per use case. Personal senders and marketing teams both start with a structured layout instead of a blank canvas.
Open Placeholder Demo
Personalize at scale with variable data
Tag any element as a variable inside the template, recipient name, address, message, offer code, and connect a structured data source. The headless API generates a unique personalized card for each record without a manual editor session per recipient.
Open Variable Data Demo
Export production-ready files
Design validation flags bleed, safe area, and resolution issues in the editor as customers work. Exports support PDF and PDF/X with the template’s bleed, trim, CMYK conversion, and spot colour preservation, ready for single sends or marketing batches.
Open Validation Demo
One engine across web, mobile, and server
Individual customers design on web and mobile. Marketing teams generate campaign batches server-side. IMG.LY runs one shared creative engine across all of these contexts, so templates, front and back zone definitions, and print constraints stay consistent from the customer editor to the finished card.
Front and back zones consistent across every platform
Zone definitions, locked elements, and editing boundaries work the same on web, iOS, Android, and server. A template authored once behaves identically wherever it is used.
Print constraints enforced from editor to export
Bleed margins, spot colours, and PDF/X settings are defined at the template level and applied automatically to every output, individual orders and campaign batches alike.
Server-side generation for direct mail at scale
Generate personalised postcard variations programmatically via the Node.js renderer. Direct mail campaigns, promotional mailers, and event follow-ups produced at volume without a manual editor session per card.
How PostBuddy Launched Personalized Direct Mail for E-Commerce Without Building a Custom Editor
4×
difference in A/B-tested campaign performance
3
Nordic markets reached (DK, SE, NO)
0
custom editor maintenance — embedded SDK instead
PostBuddy is a Denmark-based startup modernizing direct mail marketing — enabling e-commerce brands to create, personalize, and automate postcard campaigns integrated with their online workflows.
It’s hard to imagine we could have launched PostBuddy without a design editor SDK. Customers want an integrated experience, and we needed to channel our limited resources into our core mission, not a custom editor.
PostBuddy
Challenge
PostBuddy needed an embedded design editor that lets non-technical e-commerce users create print-ready postcards with personalization and variable data — without burning early-stage engineering on a custom editor.
Solution
Integrated CE.SDK to deliver an in-app design experience with mail merge, custom branding, and template guidance for streamlined postcard creation.
- 4× performance gap between A/B-tested designs proved design variation matters.
- Expanded reach into Sweden and Norway on top of the Danish home market.
- Engineering stayed focused on PostBuddy’s core direct-mail automation.
Why postcard platforms trust IMG.LY
Built for both personal and campaign use cases
The same template infrastructure supports an individual designing a travel postcard and a marketing team running a 50,000-piece direct mail campaign. Neither use case requires a separate implementation.
Front and back treated as a single design system
Zone definitions, locked elements, and editing boundaries are configured together at the template level. The back of the card is never an afterthought or a manual production step.
Print correctness without customer involvement
Bleed, spot colours, and PDF/X export are defined once and enforced automatically. Validation runs during creation. Production quality does not depend on what customers know about print.
One integration, every platform and volume
Web, iOS, Android, and server. One SDK, one set of templates, consistent rendering and print constraints deployed wherever your postcard platform runs and at whatever volume it generates.
More from IMG.LY
Postcard platforms serve senders who want to say something personal and marketers who need to say it at scale
Both need a design experience that feels easy and output that arrives correctly. IMG.LY helps you build that in one integration, with front and back zone management, photo tools, variable data, print validation, and one engine across web, mobile, and server.
Postcard FAQs
Yes. The same template system serves individual senders personalising a travel photo postcard and marketing teams generating thousands of campaign variations from a single approved design. Templates are configured per use case, photo zones and text areas for personal use, variable fields and locked brand elements for campaign use, without separate implementations.
Front and back zones are defined separately at the template level using the role and scope system. Creative elements on the front are open for customer editing. Address blocks, postage areas, message zones, and legal clearance zones on the back are locked and cannot be moved or modified by customers. Both sides export as a single print-ready file.
Tag any element as a variable inside the template, recipient name, address, personalised message, offer code, and connect a structured data source. The headless API generates a unique personalised card for each record. Bleed, spot colours, and validation apply to every output automatically. No manual session per card is required.
Design validation runs continuously inside the editor as customers work. Bleed violations, elements outside the safe zone, and low-resolution images are flagged before the order is placed. Bleed margins, spot colour settings, and PDF/X export configuration are set at the template level and applied automatically at export, independent of what customers do inside the editor.
Standard postcard formats and custom dimensions are both supported. Canvas size, bleed, and trim settings are configured per template. The same SDK handles any format your fulfilment backend requires.
The SDK runs on web (React, Angular, Vue, Next.js, Svelte), iOS, Android, and server via Node.js. The same templates, zone definitions, and print constraints apply across all of them.
Yes. IMG.LY's solutions team provides different levels of support based on your licence type. Contact the team to discuss your specific postcard use case, whether personal, campaign, or both.