Birthday Thank You Card

 

Just wanted to share a quick thank you card I made for my daughter's birthday last month.  I chose a photo of her to be the main focus of the card, but I wanted to add a bit of decoration to make it a little more fun :) 

I was lucky to have a great photo to start with, though I did change the wall in background from tan to grey so it would be more neutral and not clash with the rest of the bright colors in the card. I found a few whimsical fonts, but it still was looking a little plain, so I used my Wacom tablet to draw some doodles around the words - use could also draw with your mouse or download some free sketchy doodles like these. I was very happy with the end result and how quickly I was able to pull it together - I was able to complete the whole project in a little more than an hour....now actually addressing and filling the cards out is a different story - those things sat on my desk for more than a week ;)

Fonts used: Quentin Caps

Black Oak Std

Cursive Standard

Halloween Party Invite

I couldn't let October end without acknowledging Halloween, my absolute favorite holiday to design products for (and sadly, who's glory is short-lived, to be quickly overshadowed by Christmas). Black, orange, purple, creepy characters, black cats...love it!

This is the invite I made for my daughter's Birthday this month, it's not too scary for a 3 year old's party, right??

 I made the front illustration in Illustrator, but wasn't happy with it, so I decided to try something new, and take the file into Photoshop to add some textures and effects.

 

here's my illustrator file:

(ahhhh! shield your eyes, it's hideous!)

And here it is, post-photoshop magic:

This is the original inside, scrapped because it was too hard to read and would waste way too much printer ink:

And the final inside:

To save time, I used a free, vector "frame" from Vecteezy for the inside. Sometimes, there is just not enough time to draw each and every element, that's when graphic designer Lauren takes over :) I loved this particular border and you can't argue with free. 

Spooky Wine Bottle Labels

These are some fun wine bottle labels I designed at work for Halloween 2010. Text & Design Layouts done by me, illustrations from iStock.

Sadly, even though I am trained as an illustrator and would LOVE to draw my own illustrations for projects like this, I am rarely given the opportunity because of the amount of time it takes......I could spend a few hours making some vector art, or I could spend a few minutes and download some "good enough" art from iStock. Which do you think my boss prefers???


And if you are an illustrator, looking into submitting to iStock, please reconsider! They pay you a ridiculously low comission, like 10 cents (YES, 10 CENTS!) every time someone downloads your art, while charging the downloader $10- $20. Oh, It's a sad, sad time to be an illustrator with $16K of student loan debt

On that note, Happy Halloween!!