Which Personalized Mug Suits Who

Every mug here works the same way. You pick a design, upload one photo, and a real face lands inside an illustrated scene - not stuck on top of it. You see the finished thing on screen before you pay.

So the only real decision is which design. This is a plain guide to that.

If it is for a person

Start in the people designs. The rule of thumb is to pick the character that contradicts them.

The one who is never an angel gets the halo. The one who quietly does all the work at Christmas and gets none of the credit gets Mrs Claus. The one who wears the terrible jumper every year and will not take feedback gets the Christmas sweater. The joke is the gap between the face and the costume, so the further apart those two things are, the better it lands.

If you cannot decide, the family design takes a photo for each person and runs the whole lot around the mug. It is the one that ends up on the kitchen windowsill rather than in a cupboard.

If it is for a pet, or a pet owner

The dog designs and cat designs each run to nineteen characters, and the copy is written for the animal rather than the species - the dog snowman is for the one who refuses to come back inside, the cat snowman is for the one who watches the snow from the radiator and has no intention of touching it.

Pick on personality, not breed. It is the difference between a gift that gets a polite thank you and one that gets read out loud.

If it is for work

A mug is the one personal object almost everybody keeps at work, which is why it is a better work gift than it sounds. It is also the one that goes missing most, and a mug with somebody's own face on it does not get borrowed twice.

The medical designs are the first of the job range - nurses, midwives and the rest of the ward - built for graduations, pinning ceremonies, the end of a placement, leaving dos, Nurses Week and the International Day of the Midwife. More professions are being added - there is a fuller guide to nurse gifts if that is the one you need now.

If it is for an occasion

The occasion range covers the whole catalogue sorted by when you would give it. For Christmas specifically, the hot chocolate mugs are the ones that keep getting used after the decorations come down, which is a reasonable test of whether a Christmas gift was any good.

If you have genuinely no idea

Two honest suggestions.

First, go and look at their phone photos - or yours, of them. The right design usually suggests itself from the photo rather than the other way round. A picture of somebody mid-laugh wants a ridiculous costume. A dignified portrait wants a more ridiculous one.

Second, everything sits under $30, so this is not a decision that needs agonising over. The full range is one page.

Before you order

The design matters less than the photo. A good design with a bad photo is a bad mug, and it is nearly always the same handful of mistakes - a picture forwarded through a messaging app, a face too small in the frame, or one ceiling bulb doing all the lighting. Two minutes on the photo guide is the best-spent time in the whole process.

Every mug is 11 oz glossy white ceramic, printed on both sides, dishwasher and microwave safe, and made to order. Shipping is free.