Happy New Year 2022 (ROC Year 111) Greeting Card Design

As only a few hours remain in ROC Year 110 (2021 AD) and ROC Year 111 (2022 AD) approaches, today I specially designed an image-based greeting card to celebrate Happy New Year.

Although it’s not yet the Year of the Tiger (yes, for some reason I have to explain the lunar-solar calendar time gap every year), I still used a tiger-skin (which also resembles a tiger’s mouth) motif, incorporating the ROC Year 111 calendar numerals into this simple greeting card.

Background color: F3CE18

That said, whenever the topic of calendars comes up, my friends and I always end up arguing over seemingly trivial matters. Never mind whether the New Year should follow the solar or lunar calendar — we can each make a case for whether the solar calendar should be called the Western calendar or the Gregorian calendar.

Later we discovered that abroad there is actually a school of scholars advocating the “Human Era” calendar, rejecting the Western calendar system centered on Catholic and Christian religions. Under a pragmatism based on the Gregorian calendar, they simply add 10,000 years — so 2022, for example, becomes Human Era year 12022. This lets the human calendar be truly equal, and also eliminates the flaw of the Western calendar system having no year zero.