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It’s become a tradition of mine to design a custom Christmas card every year. For the first few years, while I was at RISD, I would make letterpress cards to send out to my closest friends. However, last year and this year, due to time constraints, I only had time to design a digital card.
I began thinking about this year’s card over Thanksgiving and came up with the idea of making it into a puzzle. I designed a custom wordsearch, where the leftover letters spelled out the URL to a secret, unlisted YouTube video when read from left to right, top to bottom. I hoped that it would become clear that it was a YouTube URL when “watch?v=” began to emerge, since that’s recognizable to anyone on YouTube.
I definitely took a risk of making it a bit too hard by not providing a list of words, but I’m happy to say that as of a week after Christmas, over 130 people have solved the puzzle and found the video! If you didn’t manage to solve it, you can cheat by checking out the answer key here.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!