The Ribbon Blog Theme

Hello friends. It's been a while since I've updated. Sorry about that! This semester has been full of business and the blog has been placed on the back burner. The combination of classes, work (x's 2), wedding planning and a long distance relationship have kept me quite busy.

Today I have a web design project I just finished to share with you. We were asked to create a blog theme. I chose to create a theme that is heavily image based, since those are my favorite kind. Without further ado, here are two pages from my blog theme. Enjoy!

Here is the homepage of the ribbon themed blog.

 And here is a post page of the blog theme.

I hope you enjoy. I have several finished projects that I need to post on here. Hopefully I will post those here in the near future! Have a great day.

Things to Achieve

1. Be a confident designer.

2. Draw more and accept that I can draw.

3. Stay positive.

4. Learn how to create type that is beautiful.

5. Absorb all design that is around me.

6. Be bold with color.

7. Design well and claim it despite lack of experience in years.

I'm sure there are more that will come up, but these are the things I think about that hold me back as a designer. I need to continue to try new things to push myself as a designer. I'm excited to soon be dedicating all of my working hours in the day to design and all that it entails.

AIGA Redesign

So for my first project in my Interactive Design class we were asked to come up with a redesign for the AIGA website. See the real one here. I thought I would share what I came up with! We were only asked to design 2 pages, the home page and the bottom level page.

There it is! I hope you enjoyed. On a side note, this semester I will be blogging when I can! If you feel like you need to see what I'm liking often, look up my Pinterest!

A Snow Day's Work

I guess a snow day is a good day to get back in the swing of things right? This Christmas and the first few weeks of class have been completely crazy. Blogging has seemed so intimidating just because I've been busy. Today classes got cancelled here because we had a huge blizzard-esque storm blow through last night. The roads are ice rinks. This just means that I've been holed up in my room all day and I have chosen to make this day super productive. I've spent the majority of my day working on a redesign for my aunt's hair salon. I've worked up a couple versions for her in the past but I haven't been super thrilled about any of them so progress has been sloooow. Today, I finally have worked up something that I'm pretty excited about and I'm hoping will be the winner! It's not finished yet, but here are some progress shots of what I've been up to today.

I started out just looking at fonts again, I thought I needed a super fresh start, but after looking for a while and going back to what I had, I decided there was some potential.

Then I traced what I had before to get it down to a better structure that I could work from. Here is right after I traced everything in illustrator before revisions.

Once I tightened everything up, I printed it out and started playing with line width and embellishments on paper. Here is my favorite sketch so far. I'm waiting for the world to thaw so that I can go to my work place and use CS5 to alter the line width, so for the rest of the evening I'll just be adding the embellishments to my digital version.

Well there you have it, the process of a young, inexperienced designer. I hope to have this finished soon along with its applications. Stay warm!

Merry Christmas Followers!

So I've been a failure of a blogger this break. Sorry friends! It's been a busy break full of family, friends, and wedding planning so my blog has been a low priority. On my to do list I've checked off a few things, but still have a lot to go such as designing my wedding invitation and choosing my art pieces for my Senior Art Show at ACU. Big stuff. Next week I will be in New Orleans visiting family and I will have limited internet access so I won't tease you with empty promises, I'm pretty sure I just won't be blogging. Ok, enough of the update, I thought I would leave you with an impromptu Christmas card I made after some silliness at our first faux-Christmas! Merry Christmas! Love Bonni and Marc!

PS - We got our engagement pictures done today (I think they will be much better than these) so be looking for those! So excited to see them.

My Thanksgiving

I thought I would post a few shots from Thanksgiving. I promise I will try really hard to keep up with blogging over my Christmas break! I apologize in advance for lack of blog posts.

Some of my favorites. I hope your holiday season is going well! Christmas is right around the corner!

Understanding Myself as a Designer

"Most to-do list creatives cannot drop everything to spend days 

lost in monk-like focus."

"Creative work is not a task to be checked off a 

next actions list. If you decide that you need to complete a particular project by the end of a block, for example, you're likely to either be frustrated 

by your lack of progress or rush out something mediocre."

"When you face a block of time dedicated to finishing a milestone, your mind avoids detours 

as they might delay your progress. When you instead focus on process, your mind is free to follow the path most important to eventually producing high-quality output."

I just read an article by Cal Newport that really makes me feel better about the way my brain works. I think one of the biggest challenges of being a graphic design student is being surrounded by so many people who work differently from you. It makes you feel really inferior when a classmate can crank out a genius piece of work in class and it takes you hours just to find the right direction. Reading this article I think will definitely help me not become frustrated as easily at my mental process of developing creative work. I suggest that you glance it over, especially if you are a "to-do list creative." Above are a few of my favorite pieces from the article.

Where Have I Been?

So like I said earlier, it's been a busy few weeks! I've been finishing up big projects, papers and studying up for final tests along with wedding planning fun like getting my dress fitted! Whew. I had another partner project in my Persuasive Graphics class and last night we were finishing up our redesign of LaLa's Lemonade. My teammate Jessica Floe (yep, same gal from Free People) was taking pictures of our misadventures last night and then she created a photo montage of awesome. It pretty much sums up the business, insanity, hard work and just exhausted apathy we've all been experiencing the last few weeks. Enjoy!

ACU Craft Fair

Hi friends! Yesterday was such a busy day! A lot of the time I usually spend in the evenings to blog I spent yesterday making these fun decorative poof balls to sell at the ACU Craft Fair tomorrow! I will post a picture of them a little later. For now, here is the flier I made for the fair with all of the info about the fair! If you are in Abilene, you should come! There are always a lot of really great things available for purchase!

Pictures of Christ

A couple weekends ago, the church my mom attends and the one I attend when I'm in Keller had a "Church has left the building" weekend. Life Giving weekend is what they called it. The basic idea is to have every member of the congregation sign up for a volunteer project for the weekend. They provide an extensive list of opportunities that people can sign up for. My mom had the opportunity to be a project this year! They do an excellent job of taking care of their own congregation as well, so when they went searching for families in the church to help, my mom's name popped up due to some bad erosion issues we were having along the side of our house. So bright and early Sunday morning a group of families showed up ready to serve and boy did they! They completely fixed our erosion stuff and they helped us clean up around the house as well. My mom and I talked about what a humbling experience it is to have someone come into your home and clean with you. It was a tough pill to swallow at first, but the blessings that came from that humility were outstanding. Below is a picture that embodies what we determined was the greatest blessing and the entire purpose of Life Giving Weekend. The guys from the church were working away outside when our precious neighbors popped their little heads over the fence (they do that a lot) and the men working were readily explaining what they were doing to them. Later that evening a lot of our neighbors came and talked to my mom about what went on earlier and she was able to explain to them the love of Christ that was shown to her in the form of service. That's the whole goal of this ambitious weekend and I would say that Christ definitely worked through the service provided at my mom's house to touch the lives of many others.

The Holidays Are Here!

Hello friends!

I'm back! After a totally wonderful break, I'm really having a hard time getting back into the swing of things. Enjoying the delight of friends, family, food and relaxation makes school not sound so fun at all. The woes of a college student eh? Today, I'm going to share with you a fun illustration I did for a friend's Christmas party! She came up with the concept and I just love it! It came out as a pretty fun stache.

Christmas has been on my mind all day! I hope your holiday season started off right.

Happy Thanksgiving Week!

Hello friends!

I'm going to be taking the week off in blog world! It's going to be a busy week full of family and wedding planning and turkey eating! I hope you all are blessed with rest and a great holiday!

Free People Catalog - Finished!

I got to work with two very awesome ladies on a catalog project over the past few weeks. I thought I would post what we came up with. It's not portfolio final, but I figured you guys were just itching to see it.

I hope you enjoy our catalog. There are a few things we need to tweak, but we will get to that in portfolio class next semester! While you're here you should check out my partners' websites: Jessica Floe and Con He. They are both super talented as well. It was a pleasure working with you girls! Also shout out to our awesome models. We so appreciate you girls working with us! Our catalog is so much more beautiful because of you!

Free People Catalog Shoot Preview

Ok, not for the real Free People Catalog! My next project in my Information Graphics Class is a catalog design and my group chose Free People! We did a photo shoot for our images today, and I decided to give you a sneak peek of one of mine. Be looking for some finals to come! Sorry about the late post today! What a whirlwind Monday!

Thanks goes out to two of my amazing residents Leigh and Elle! You girls are life savers.

How to Make a Pie!

I recently finished a fun (but a bit tedious) How To project in one of my classes! It was fun to explore a simpler and solely computer based style of illustration. Learning what worked and what didn't was a challenge, but I feel like it came out pretty good! Have a look, let me know what you think! Do you see something that you love or even hate? I would love to hear some feedback from my readers.

Here is the full poster, it's full size is 18" x 24" If you click on it you can see the full size with more detail:

 Here are a few detail photos:

 

If you try out the recipe, let me know how it comes out!

Monica!

My beautiful little sister turned 17 today! I decided to dedicate a post to her. She's a wonderful, goofy, talented, fun, hilarious, and oh did I mention BEAUTIFUL young lady! I love having her in my family. Happy birthday sistaaa!

We won!

Here's a shout out to everyone who voted for Marc and I like crazy over the last 5 days! We were just overwhelmed with support and love during the whole process. It is such a blessing to receive as a couple! A lot of you are asking what we won, so I'll tell you!

We won an hour and a half to two hour engagement photo session with Erin Woolsey which is a $300 value. She's a great photographer, if you didn't check out her work while you were voting, you definitely should! We probably won't get around to actually taking our pictures until Thanksgiving time at the soonest. I will keep you posted though.

We also won 50 free save the dates that will be designed by Wednesday Custom Design, run by Garett and Jessica Mayfield. I don't really know how much this is actually worth yet, but they are super talented people as well. I almost forgot to mention, all of these wonderful people are ACU Alum! A group I envy and will soon be a part of as well ;-)

If you voted for us (especially those of you who spammed your friends and voted daily [or more]) let me know! Maybe even shoot me an email with your home address in it =]

I will be back to blogging daily starting tomorrow!

Help me out?

Friends! We made the cut to voting in the contest we entered! Woohoo! Here is our picture taken by the wonderful Rachel Elam!

 

Want to help us out? Go to Erin Woolsey's Blog and vote and then go to Wednesday Cutom Design's Blog and vote again, and then repeat with every internet accessing device you can get your hands on! Voting ends on October 20th. I will be sure to update on whether we win or not!

Woohoo! We are excited! Thanks!

Everee Wednesday Contest Sneak Peak

Marc and I entered a contest to win some free engagement pictures and Save the Dates. We got pretty creative, I think. Here's a glimpse of what we were working with. Come back Friday to see if we made it to the voting round and to see some more pictures from our fun shoot!

Red Dirt Adventure Challenge

Last weekend a friend asked me to come out and photograph a race ACU Outdoor Club hosts called the Red Dirt Adventure Challenge (RDAC for short). It was an early morning and a beautiful day! The race consisted of a biking section and a running section. There were quite a few participants and everyone had fun. Here are some of the photos I took!

He raced in the Just for Fun category, and had a fun get up for his bike!

 

These were the trophies of the year. High quality ;-)

 

Congrats to the winners of the race! I'm glad I had the opportunity to help out even in a small way!