I love paper products - journals, postcards, note pads, note cards, and just good solid letter paper; stationery is one of my favorite things to purchase. And, this past year it has become one of my most favorite things to create as well.
It started with some apple postcards for the Niles, MI apple festival. I work with the adobe creative suite and curved lines have always been an issue for me in Illustrator. Well, I made an apple, and I was pumped. An apple! A curvy red apple. I was (am still) proud of that apple. So I went design crazy and came up with a whole set of apple themed postcards. They were cute, simple, and somewhat kitschy. I loved them. Unfortunately, I was one of the only ones, because only a few actually sold.
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| "You are the Apple of my Eye" Postcard |
Oh well. They were cute anyway.
Then the holiday season began and I started thinking about holiday cards. This time I studied trending color schemes and thought of what other people might like verse my own taste. I turned out five simple, colorful, cute designs. These sold much better! Not brilliant, but better. As I mailed packs of holiday cards out to purchasers, I knew I was hooked on designing stationery. I wanted to create more. I loved the feeling of designing something and sharing it with others in a physical and usable form.
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| "Happy Holidays" Postcard |
Bivie and I discussed it, for all of five seconds because she loves stationery too, and we decided to add stationery to our publishing business we were working on developing.
From there the designs kind of exploded out of me.
I love to create and the ideas are always flowing. Most of the time I’ll be working my day job and an idea will hit me. I’ll quickly jot it down and when I get home from work, I’ll get right back to work and make it happen.
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| Front: "I sent this Postcard to let you know I'm not dead.." Back: Unless something catastrophic happend since I posted this. [In which case I'm sorry for my bad taste in postcards]." |
Othertimes it takes a bit more. I’ll have an idea, but I’m not sure how to execute the idea yet. These type of designs are my favorite; the ones where I push my boundaries, learn new ways to handle design tools, or even explore different mediums.
Most recently I wanted to create a piece where birds were intermingling and reacting to splashes of ink. It was loosely inspired by the visual effects in The Huntsman, mixed with the pattern crushed berries made on my moms driveway. I could picture the image in my head but with my current skill level I couldn't create it from scratch with Illustrator or Photoshop. So, for the first time ever I used India Ink with a paint brush.
With the blank sheet of paper before me, I was actually nervous. It was new, I had never used the medium before. Hell, I didn't even have experience hand drawing birds, let alone with ink and brush. My wife was sitting across from me, drawing her own drawing, and hackling me for being afraid to put brush to paper. It was just the push I needed. In the end I had fun playing with the ink, and enjoyed seeing how it interacted with the paper, and water too.
The drawing ended up turning out well. At least as well as I had hoped it would.
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| "Birds Flying" Notecards |
This type of design is an achievement, if for no other reason than I didn't let the fact that I had no experience intimidate me out of doing it.
I like to take my time to make sure I’m confidant the design is strong. Part of that is knowing when to move forward and when to step back.
Since last fall (almost a year now) I have been trying to create buildings and famous structures.
Well… I’m not that good at trying to recreate architecture. In fact, I’ve deleted more files and crumpled more pieces of paper trying to form this idea, than any other idea. Sure, I could buy the graphic, but where is the fun in that?
Finally one weekend I decided maybe I just needed to put more time into it. With six graphics to create, I dove into the design once more. Five hours later, I had an Eiffel Tower graphic.
Five hours. One graphic.
Maybe I’m being hard on myself, but I feel like it should have taken me two or less. Not to mention I still have five other structures left to design. But, that was the first time I actually created an architectural structure, which is why, after thinking about it some more, I’m perfectly fine with it taking me five hours to create only one element of a design.
It’s fun for me to challenge myself with ideas. It’s one of the reasons I’m so passionate when I talk about them with other people.
I like clean lines, I like designs that aren’t cluttered with unnecessary elements, and I try for basic color combinations or colors that vibrate off each other. Those are the basic elements of my designs. I definitely break from my mold and try new techniques but my clean, simple, colorful esthetic is usually what I aim to achieve.
With almost a year under my belt and dozens of designs, it’s hard to believe that my push toward stationery started because I was proud of an apple. But, I’ve learned it wasn’t so much the apple as much as it was achieving something I didn’t think I could do.
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| "Birch Trees" - Notecard |
I’m excited to continue designing stationery and hope you enjoy seeing the finished products!
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