Branding Suite

This is worth showing just because it is worth showing that, yes, I can at least manage my own branding. If I can’t do that then would I be able to handle anyone else’s?

Class Projects

This is a diverse collection that shows that I can handle a range of projects, after all, it isn’t all about me when it comes to design.

Logo Design-Upper Crust Bakery

The assignment was to design a logo for this bakery that wanted to convey to customers the experience of visiting a bakery in Paris, France. I started by looking at images of Paris which inspired my color palette, the pink and gold being a nod to the quality of the light in the city and the stone making up many of the buildings. The black and line work has irregularities in width inspired by the decorative wrought iron featured in much of the cities architecture. The overall effect is a logo that looks like a hand painted sign someone would see on the window of an old bakery in Paris.

Print Ad-Amethyst Bay

This project allowed me to choose from a range of promotional themes for the resort, I chose reiki as a spa treatment that I’m familiar with and could readily explain in a print add.  A news piece I saw at the time discussing the importance of inclusion inspired me to choose to look for images that used non-Caucasian models.  A challenge with this piece was the logo of the resort, it is dated, as in throw back logo to the 1980s.  If I had this resort as an actual client, I would look for tactful ways of suggesting that it is time to update their branding.

Designing with Typeography

The challenge of this assignment was to get all of the text of the article on a two page magazine spread and make it look good. This means my best chance at bringing some style to the piece was through the text itself. The title of the article was my main chance to bring in personality through text so I opted to choose a distinctive font that was different from the main body text. For this font I wanted something that was a nod to Japanese culture without being kitsch or even rude. I found one called Bamboo that comes across as inspired by modern Japanese design. The layout includes some other elements such as a side border made from a famous Japanese wood block print but the feature element is the text.

Branding Suite-TOWN

The objective of this class project was to work in desktop publishing skills.  We were presented with a business profile and its branding components.  TOWN was described as a refined Chinese cuisine establishment, so my design was inspired by art gallery presentation, minimalist to keep the focus on the art, in this case the food.

Textile Designs

Necessity is the mother of invention that was how I got started doing textile design. I wanted a fabric print that didn’t exist, not even close, but in my exhaustive online search to find it I found Spoonflower, a company that offers print on demand fabrics and they invite anyone to design prints and sell them through their company. Print design offers me a great opportunity to explore working with different mediums.

Mod Dots

This is the print that started it all, my very first textile print. As visually simple as it is I learned a lot while creating it. Here is the thing with design, no matter how much experience for real design innovation being willing to try new things is essential. If you have an idea but you’re not sure if it will work you just have to try. This print I started with a straightforward idea, much what you see here, gray on gray dots with a scattering of red dots. I started with perfectly round dots all perfectly aligned, when it was done I found all that perfection was visually disturbing to me. I started to experiment with how I colored the shapes when I accidently colored outside some lines. I liked it. I did this to more of the dots and found that the manually colored in dots, that were not perfectly round, somehow looked better, more approachable.

Wired Bohemian

I like to work in both analogue (or manual) mediums, where I apply medium to paper or canvas, I’ve find this inspiring and can be combined with digital very well. This was done using a combination of analogue and digital work.  The shapes themselves were done with a Spirograph set, then scanned into my computer and turned into vector images using Illustrators live trace. Behind the black shapes there are larger shapes in grey, adding subtle visual interest. When the designs were scanned and converted to vector images the computer captured and vectorized every little variation in the ink of the design.

Classic Blue Mosaic

A fabric print done for a design challenge sponsored by Spoonflower.  The assignment was to design a print using this limited palette of just the four shades of blue used in the piece.  With so many other designers likely to do more complex designs I decided to do something simpler that could be easily paired with any of them.  The mosaic pattern provides a visually neutral accept print to go with other designs from the challenge.  As with the Mod Dots print I laid out my shapes with Adobe Illustrator and then colored in the tiles by hand.  The repeating pattern is 12 x 12 inches.

I feel this project makes a strong argument that I don’t have to work directly with another designer in order to create something that compliments their work. This is important because sometimes in design you don’t have access to the designer of the source material.

Leaves

Possibly the biggest challenge in designing for textile prints is designing a hidden repeat.  With a hidden repeat a viewer should need a large piece of the fabric to even pick-up that the print is repeating and then it should be difficult to figure out where exactly the print begins and ends.  This visually simple design is laid out over an 18×18 inch square so to have it repeat across fabric that is thirty inches wide (on average) the print had to align on four sides.  For designs such as this digital skills are essential because it allows you to test ideas and techniques without having to draw everything over and over again. I changed the colors on this multiple times. It isn’t what I had originally envisioned but it works.

Moroccan Blue and Moroccan Blue Too

These are companion prints I did to compliment one another.  Collections of two or more prints are important because they allow customers to purchase perfectly coordinated fabrics for their projects.  These designs were inspired by antique Moroccan tiles.  Not only do they share a color palette but both feature lines running diagonally.  Blue Morocco 2 has less detail so that it visually compliments rather than competes with the “king” design, Blue Morocco.

Commissioned Work

My first commissioned piece was this logo for a dance costume designer. Her work merges both traditional and modern styles in costumes. I chose to show this by creating a logo that combines classic and modern design elements. The dancer graphic is both in that the dancer is posed in classical ballet form and wearing a classical ballet costume, but the way the image is drawn, using a single continuous line, is decidedly modern.

This design was all done digitally. Adobe illustrator made it easy to do this single continuous line drawing and adjust using vectors.

Anime and Manga Merch

Anime and manga merch design is where I can really show why I love Photoshop and it has been one of my favorite programs for twenty years. As someone who enjoys playing with analogue mediums Photoshop allows me to experiment with a wide range of mediums for relatively little money and saving a lot of time. The “brush” styles available realistically mimic real world mediums and I find working with the digital counterparts to be just as satisfying to work with.