Valentine’s Day 2013

I made some Valentine’s Day cards for the fam. I kept it simple with the help of supplies from Paper Source.
1) Letterpress Monogrammed Noted Cards (V for Valentine)
2) Gold flat cards. I trimmed off a little over half an inch from the cards. Then, I glued them to the letterpressed card leaving about a quarter of an inch of border around the bottom and sides. That’s where I made the measurements. I’m not sure how far under the “V” they are.
3) A2 Red envelopes.

I wrote a nice note on the gold part of the card, and mailed them off. They didn’t take long to make, and I was able to send something a little more personal than usual.

Christmas Ornaments

For Christmas this past year, I made ornaments that I gave as gifts. The pattern set was six holiday themed mugs. Unfortunately, I wrapped and mailed three of them before I took pictures. It’s a janlynn pattern, and you can check out their stuff at janlynn.com. This set of ornaments was designed by Sandy Garbrandt. (This is not a commercial. I’m just giving credit where credit is due.)

Each ornament was about 3.5″ counted cross-stitch. After making each ornament I cut them out and coated them with a white glue and water mixture to make them stiff. After they were mostly dry, I covered them with plastic and then rested a heavy book on them so they’d lie flat. When they were fully dry and flat, I glued a cotton batting to the back, and, again, rested a heavy book on top while it dried. After that, I glued on the sparkly ribbon loops for hanging.

I made some mistakes following the pattern of the mug on the far right, but no one can tell. So, I win!

I really enjoyed making these, and might make other ornament sets as gifts. The pattern variety means I can keep the gifts personal even though I’m doing things in a batch. They were super fun to make, and the receivers appreciated them very much.

Football Mushrooms

Adobe Illustrator asked for content this week. Tweet them a football related work that you’ve done in Illustrator. This is what I came up with.

Custom PowerPoint Template for Client

My company is creating a series of webinars for a client with some custom content. There are several webinars, but their presentation format needed to be uniform across the board, so I needed to create a template just for these programs. It’s our standard presentation template with some adjustments. The repeated band element in the deck is usually a neutral brown, but the client prefers our blue. So, the cover slide is now a deep blue, and I used PowerPoint’s own color adjustment tools to change the repeating element to a light blue. The other two main colors in the template are our primary yellow, and secondary purple.

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The content of these webinars includes several breaks for participant check-ins as well as moments to use WebEx tools. I had to create a standard layout for whiteboard exercises, cue slides to indicate when to use WebEx’s chat feature, the polling features, and other participant indicator features. I created these master layout pages in PowerPoint’s Master View. It makes putting together all of these presentations much smoother. It also ensures visual uniformity with the repeated pieces of content across the webinars.

I actually really like PowerPoint. It very neatly supports its purpose as a tool to create visual presentations. I think there’s so much bad design in PowerPoint presentations that the program doesn’t get the props it deserves for being quite a powerful tool.

Bon Appétit

Dimensions Crafts: “Bon Appétit”
Counted Cross-Stitch 7″ X 5″

Original Pattern

Completed pattern

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another counted cross-stitch project! This is my favorite needle craft, so there will be a lot of these.

I made this pattern for some friends who recently got married. I’m not a huge fan of existing wedding theme patterns, so I like to find something that can be easily personalized. This pattern was a great find. The picture fits the couple, and the chalkboard space allowed me to make this pattern a lot more meaningful.

I created a grid of the chalkboard in Illustrator, and used that to sketch out the names. I used a basic, slightly calligraphic letter style. You can find this type pattern anywhere. Luckily, I’m familiar enough with letters on a grid that, after perusing a few patterns for reference, I was able to mostly draw this out myself.

I really enjoyed watching this picture come to life. Now the image appropriately lives in my friends’ kitchen. Hooray!

T: An MBTA Musical

I got a great opportunity to create the marketing materials for the summer production of T: An MBTA Musical performed at the Oberon Theatre in Boston. I’m lucky enough to know the composer and several of the performers, and I’m so grateful that these creative people reached out to me for original work. I designed a poster, the icon used in Facebook and Twitter, the headline banner logo for Facebook, and the program.

The poster and Facebook materials were a combination of Illustrator 5 and InDesign 5.5. The MBTA Charlie knock-off was drawn in Illustrator, and I also manipulated a Red Line T-stop photo in Illustrator with Live Trace to give it a look that better matched Charlie. Using the MBTA signage as inspiration for the text and type was a natural way to go.

The program was put together in InDesign. Its inspiration came from the T maps of all the stops. I’m really proud of the program. I think it’s a nice homage to the T signs and visuals, and keeps the whimsy that the show itself was going for.

I had a lovely time putting all of these pieces together. I love projects that require different related pieces. I’m really inspired and fulfilled doing work that requires parallel design and variations on a theme.

Massive Attack Video

A music video animated to “Two Rocks and a Cup of Water” by Massive Attack. An AfterEffects exercise for my college motion graphics class.

All students created a short animated clip with dots. We then used and manipulated all or only clips of choice to create an amateur video. This is what I came up with.

Collaborative Video

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