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.

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!

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!

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.

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!

Letterpress Obession

Have you figured out that my newest obsession is letterpressed anything? Here are some handmade business cards made by Sophie Gallo from her home office. I'm just drooling over her equipment, it's all the things I want for my future life as a designer. She letterpressed the front of her cards then screen printed and Gocco Printed the back. Pretty nifty stuff.

Here is a video of her using her letterpress:


I found this here.

How Low Can Your Logo

I stumbled over one of the silliest contests I've ever seen today. It's called How Low Can Your Logo, and the basic idea is to make the worst logo for this fake company. I took a look around the gallery of submissions and it just makes me chuckle because I'm sure I could show a few to some people I know and they would think that they were great. If you're bored and needing some entertainment, you should check out the submissions. I think these will be keeping me occupied until December 8th.

Width Tool

So I was doing a good job for a while about not lusting over CS5, and then I saw this.



omg. i love illustrator cs5 from Jessica Hische on Vimeo.
Drools...

Glow in the Dark!

Did you know that there is a such thing as glow in the dark ink? Well, I guess I should have known, but here is an awesomely creative use of the quirky stuff by Dolce Press.

I found this here.

Beautiful Things

Here are a few things that I have tagged as "beautiful" in my RSS feed lately:

1, 2, 3, 4

Hand Drawn Type

Today while looking for some project inspiration, I stumbled over the work of Kristofer Delaney. He is a designer/illustrator and on his portfolio he has a whole section for his hand drawn type. This is an ability that I have recently been envying in my own work and practicing on sticky notes when I'm bored. Enough talk, let's look at some of his stuff!

This last one is my favorite. All the detail is just great and communicates the message so well! Have a happy Monday readers!

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!

Jessica Hische

Thanks to Friends of Type, I think I found one of my favorite designers! Jessica Hische does beautiful design, illustration and typography. I just clicked and clicked through her site and want to click more but I feel that I should probably do some of my own design homework (eek)! Anyways, here are a few of my favorite things that I just pulled from her site.

 I just love the detail in this piece:

 The colors in this sticker set are basically awesome:

If I could get my aunt's hair salon logo to look this awesome, life would be good:

Here is a beautifully detailed typeface she designed:

And here is a very pretty holiday themed poster, I'm excited for Christmas already:

Oil and Water

The BP oil spill is something that hits close to home with me. I'm compelled by the art that has come out of this awful disaster. It has inspired so many beautiful pieces. Here is another one! This one is done by Happiness Brussels, and all of the benefits of this project go to the Oil Spill and Coast Restoration Efforts. You can find the site dedicated to these posters here. I've posted a video to show the process of how they are actually using oil collected from the beaches to create these posters.


OIL & WATER DO NOT MIX from Happiness Brussels on Vimeo.
Here is the final product.

Food as a Medium

While browsing my Google Reader (thanks Sandra for showing me how that works!) I stumbled on two print pieces that use food as part of the production on FPO. One is fun and silly, the other is serious and compelling. Let's get into it!

First a piece made by Beau Eaton for a competition by Greenpeace. His piece addresses the huge oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico caused by BP. He created these prints and then covered it in chocolate syrup to signify the oil. Unfortunately pouring chocolate syrup all over it means that the piece is not permanent, but here are some great photos of the work. I think it's quite effective.

On a lighter note, here is a poster based on that song by Katy Perry that gets stuck in everyone's head "California Gurls." This one is done by Excuses Design Collective and was just a fun project they decided to try out. The FPO post goes into more depth about the style they chose and why they used sprinkles. Check it out.

 

Makes me want an ice cream sundae a little bit.

Harold's BBQ Sauce

Here is a project I did for my Packaging Design class. We redesigned a BBQ Sauce bottle for a local BBQ favorite, Harold's. We also designed 2 additional products, I chose to do Harold's Damn Hot Relish and a spice rub. Here are some photos taken by my professor Nil Santana of my final products.

 

Find my classmates work here.

Slowpoke Farm

This project was assigned in my Identity and Brand Design class. We worked with 2 organic farmers in the Abilene area who own Slowpoke Farm. We had to come up with a new identity for this business based on what these clients wanted and this is what I came up with! It was a fun project and a big challenge (since we were designing basically against our classmates and trying to come up with something good and original). Anyways, enjoy!

This is an emblem, which is something our clients were really attracted to. They emphasized the desire to have a mark that they could use almost as a stamp. They also requested that a sun be used to represent their main source of energy and nourishment. The stitching helps represent the hands on approach to farming that Slowpoke practices, since stitching is something usually perceived as a handmade craft.

 

 

Here is the color mark of my emblem. Green for organic and health and yellow for the natural energy provided by the sun.

 

 

This is my second mark. It is a signature which is a combination of a pictoral symbol and a word mark. This mark is intended to be used as a whole at first but as it picks up recognition, the symbol can be used alone more as a stamp.

 

 

Here is the color version of this mark. I used the same colors as the previous mark.

The owners of Slowpoke Farm are now in the process of choosing a mark (out of the 30 something we provided for them) to use. I will let you guys know if mine is chosen!