Fair Trade Valentine's Cards - Free Download!

Happy Valentine's Day! I figured I better break my month long silence and share something....

This card I drew for Fair Trade Campaigns last year is available as a free download on their website here. It was created for customers to send to their favorite fair trade farmers & artisans.

Just for fun, here are 2 alternate versions that I loved, but sadly didn't get picked : ( I had an elaborate plan of making a different background for each of the fair trade industry they were trying to highlight: roses, coffee, chocolate, plus a "generic" square version that could be used for other products, but they wanted to go with something simpler. The coffee & generic versions are shown below.

Do you have a favorite fair trade product? Mine is definitely CHOCOLATE - I have to have a bar at my desk at all times - it helps me work!

More Fair Trade Design!

Last month I finished up a several month long project for Fair Trade Towns and Fair Trade Colleges and Universities. My job was to create an entire line of stationery, Word and Powerpoint templates which could easily be filled with information by the Fair Trade staff. I don't think I will ever enjoy designing templates in Word ( I kept wishing it would act like InDesign!), but thankfully Powerpoint was much easier to navigate. I also designed two Digital Toolkits (excepts shown above). The original PDFs have clickable hyperlinks and buttons:) and are available for download in the Resource Libraries on the Fair Trade site. 

GO Bananas for Fair Trade Campaign

GO Bananas Facebook Timeline Photo

It was a few months in the making, but the Go Bananas For Fair Trade Campaign I worked so hard on is finally live! For this project, I got to design and illustrate the logo, spot illustrations and all the promotional materials: 16 page tool kit, banana cutout, Facebook & web banners, poster & Powerpoint template - whew!

It was nice to use BOTH my illustration AND design skills on this project, hopefully I can do more work like this in the future - I really love to draw and don't get to do it professionally as much as I'd like (though I am going to be changing this in the next few months!).

To start the project off, my first job was to create the logo

Go Bananas for Fair Trade Logo

Next, I drew some spot illustrations & borders to be used on the website and campaign materials. These were done in illustrator, because vector art is so incredibly clean & useful in this type of project.

I don't think I need to mention that this was my favorite part of the entire project, hehe.

The biggest part of the campaign pack was the 16 page, text -heavy "Toolkit".

                          (cover)                                    (interior page)

 Then some web & facebook banners

(ooh, look, animation! Super easy to do in Photoshop!)

(facebook timeline photo)

A Poster

........And powerpoint templates.

If you'd like to see the Toolkit (or anything else in its entirety) everything is available to download from the Resources section of the Go Bananas website.

Go BANANAS for FAIR TRADE : Logo Design

Here's a quick little update on the start of a new project I'm working on for Fair Trade Towns. I just designed this logo for their new Fair Trade Bananas program and I'm currently working on some fun spot illustrations (yeah!).  I will share them when the project officially launches next month.

Hooray for FAIR TRADE !!!

A Catch Up Post.

I just wanted to do a quick update with some projects I did in the last couple of months.

First, more work for my favorite friends at Fair Trade USA (love them!) - a poster to match the program book and trade banner I designed for them in August.

This is available on their website as part of their resource library, and users can customize all the text to fit their event and print at the location of their choice, pretty sweet!

Next, I got to have a photo shoot at the Riverton Yogawood location, and I was able to take some pictures of some amazing yoga teachers doing poses in front of the mural I painted. 

After uploading all the photos to my computer, I was reminded that I am NOT a photographer and need to learn how to use the manual settings on my camera better, as some of my favorite photos came out a little blurry. 

I took some it front of the mural, and some not......These are some of my favorites

 There's something I like about black and white yoga photos, so classy!

 You can also check out more yoga photos on my facebook page HERE.

Fair Trade USA Program Book

I got to work quite a bit in InDesign last month (InDesign is a cousin of Photoshop, but it is mostly for multi-page text layouts), and actually enjoyed myself. I'll admit it, if I had a choice between drawing some cute, happy animals and laying out a 24 page catalog, I would pick the cute animals :) BUT- there is also something nice about using simple, clean design to organize text so that it can be read easily, especially if it's for a cause near and dear to my heart, like Fair Trade.

I designed this program booklet for the Fair Trade USA conference held this past weekend in Philadelphia, which was sponsored by wonderful, forward thinking companies like Ben & Jerry's, Ten Thousand Villages and Green Mountain Coffee. 

 I also volunteered at the conference and had a great time! I got to meet Ben Cohen of Ben and Jerry (he says his favorite flavor is Cherry Garcia and is best eaten with Newman's Own Chocolate Alphabet cookies, hehe). Here's me and my sister working the registration table.