It’s been really slow at work lately, and that makes the days seem REALLY LONG! When it starts to get slow like this, I usually come up with a project for myself to pass the time. This time, I decided to make patterns. I have been seeing some flower patterns online that I really like. So after searching through a few pages of Google images for inspiration, I headed to Illustrator to see what I could do. My first pattern was the blue and gray one. I think it’s pretty similar to one of the designs that I really liked (I didn’t save anything, just viewed it in Google and then closed the browser to design). The second one is the pink and gray one. And my final design is the one with the gray lines. It’s interesting how these evolved from pattern to pattern. I’m not sure which one is my favorite, which made it really hard to decide which one to use for my featured image!

At work, we got to do a fun design project for St. Croix Hospice! Our customer wanted a brochure created, but she didn’t want it to be a standard trifold. Her brochures get placed in hospitals in a rack next to a bunch of other brochures, so she wanted something that would stand out more. It’s rare that we get to design a more interesting fold or a die cut. I did four different designs, a gate fold, a tiered z-fold, a trifold with a that was basically a bifold with an extra flap, and a die cut that mimicked their logo. I figured the die cut of their logo wasn’t very practical because it left a lot of pieces that could tear when placed in a brochure holder, but it was fun to do something different. These brochures are all mock ups, which is why some of the photos look bad and have watermarks stamped across them. The customer ended up going with my co-worker’s design, which was really nice, so I don’t have a final piece to show you. But I really enjoyed working on this project!

I designed a logo and business cards for a co-worker who is starting a new yoga studio. Her only instructions were to use a leaf and the colors blue, brown, and silver. After showing her a few designs, she decided to stick with blue and silver and delete the brown. While doing some research on yoga logos, I noticed that a lot of them tend to use a sans-serif font for the word “yoga.” I tried to challenge this by picking a serif font, but it really didn’t look right. I had a lot of fun working on this design because I got to try out some new ideas.

I recently designed the business cards above for a client at work. The larger card in the upper-left is the design that he chose. When he first chose that design, I was happy that he didn’t choose what I thought was the worst design, but I also didn’t think that he chose the best design. After talking about it with a co-worker, I realized that the designs that I liked the best were the ones that I had put the most amount of work into. I had drawn the compass in the background of the card in the upper-right and the one below it. I had also used a reference photo of birch bark in combination with an existing font to create a new font where I had drawn in the birch bark (in upper- and lower-right cards).

In the card that he chose, I had used the star tool to create the sunset and an existing “wood” font. And my least favorite designs, the ones in the lower-left and middle-right, I had used the circle and star tools in Illustrator. Not much work.

Not long after I had finished these designs, I watched this Ted Talk.

I thought it was interesting, and it gave me a new perspective on designing for other people.

A few weeks ago, I created a postcard and flyer for St. Gertrude’s. I really liked how they turned out, so I thought I would share them. The client made some tweaks, but I liked these versions best. The waterfall picture was used on a few of their previous pieces and helped to tie everything together.