Robyn

me and some friends are going to see robyn and röyksopp in about a month and i'm really excited! when i get really excited i need some way to get my energies out. that's where this poster comes in. robyn's song call your girlfriend has a really fun music video where she's just in a giant warehouse and dances around. the dance is really fun and at first i had hoped my friends and i would learn the dance together (and break into it at the concert) but nobody ever has the same days off of work so that was out. when i was going to the john legend concert i had this same excited energy and that's why i originally started the lyrical posters. i though i could do one for robyn but she's a little crazier than those. she's more colorful and less serious. i think this poster fits her pretty well.

merry christmas!

my work had all the fixin's for cookie decorating in the break room today. they're trying really hard to make working during the holidays a not so horrible experience. impossible task, but good effort. anyway i really had fun with the cookies so i thought i'd share them here :)












they had some weird toppings (hence the above breaking bad themed cookie square - hey what was i supposed to do with blue sugar crystals?!)

JOHN LEGEND!

i just got home from the john legend concert!! oh my gosh oh my gosh oh my gosh! it was so amazing! i had front row tickets, got to watch sound check and get a picture with him! i'm still buzzing from it all! so during the meet and greet we got to take a picture - the instructions said not to bring any gifts but i couldn't help myself. i brought the lyrical poster that i made for the concert last year - and gave it to him (he asked if i had another so that he could sign it for me - heck yes i brought another!!!). oh man there are so many exclamation points in this post but there's just no other way to punctuate these sentences! it was just so amazing - this was like, my 6th concert of his - i really wanted to make it count. mission accomplished :)

coloring book

bear, medusa, harlequin, victorian

i found these super awesome prints (above) today by sean martorana on fab.com. when i saw them i thought they looked like different personas of the same person. i wanted to see if i could visually show that. i stayed up too late doing that last night! once i mashed them up it looked like a coloring book and i spent today coloring them in:

they all have the same right side of the face, with a different personality shown on the left.

Lyrical 3

rupaul needs no introduction. oooh gurl. you betta werk!

Lyrical 2

i've really been into these lyrical posters. they're a lot of fun (well tedious and time consuming and mind-numbing) but enjoyable! it's a lot of work but i'm really getting in to it! i've done a michael jackson, katy perry, taylor swift and lady gaga. this one i made for my friend who loves t swift (i feel the absolute opposite of that about her). we always joke and argue about it so while making him a cute poster that he can put on the wall, i got my own little dig in there. about an eighth of the way down the poster (during the song love story) is the line "yo, taylor. i'm really happy for you. and i'mma let you finish. but shakespear had one of the best stories of all time." and after that it's the entire play romeo and juliet. ha! i love it.

Lyrical

i'm going to go see john legend in concert thanksgiving weekend and i'm really excited. he's just the most amazing. anyway i'm so excited i decided try and get some of my wigglies out by being creative. i really like the way this turned out!

Fontographer

So it seems I may now be a typographer. Okay maybe that's going to far. But after successfully (at least in my opinion) creating two families of type I'm pretty much an expert.

This was a lot of fun. Initially spurred by a quirk of writing a book with some friends, I decided that I would make typefaces out of their handwriting (to give the book a journaled feel). After I got theirs out of the way (ie my test subjects) I moved on to my own. This became a more daunting and time-consuming task than I thought I set out on. I normally write in all caps but I didn't think this would translate or read well in book form. So I ended up using uppers and lowers. This wasn't good

cool chart of top typefaces

enough. In my writing there is often emphasis added. That meant I needed either italics or bold. I went with italics, but then decided that I liked that almost more than regular. So I might use that face in the book. Which would mean I still needed an emphasis, so bold and bold italic followed. By this time though, I really wanted my real handwriting, so I ended up doing all four faces in small caps as well. All-in-all it turned out really well, and it's super fun to type and it show up looking like my handwriting.

The time thing I mentioned earlier was an interesting thing to keep track of. Here's a few ways I measured my time investment in this project:
• TV (that I watched in a small corner of my computer screen): 3 seasons of Breaking Bad
          + 1 season of Sherlock, Luthor and Shameless
    • Olympics: 34 gold, 22 silver and 25 bronze medals for team amuricah (U-S-A! U-S-A!)
• Kering pairs (two glyphs manually spaced): 34,486
• Glyphs: 845

graduation present

i did some drawing for the first time in a looooong time. this one was done because it was required of me. i drew my niece dietra as her graduation present, so the same needed to be done for justice. and her graduation is quickly approaching. i've been putting it off, just because it's been so long, but today was one of my last days off before i go back to nebraska. so i buckled down and got to drawing.

i'm happy with the results.

Wedding!!!

my little sister is getting married! so awesome. and a little weird. she is my little sister after all. it makes sense though. when we were little, she was always the one playing house while i was off filling in my coloring book with the smudges of every crayon i could find. anyway, she asked me to design her invites. of course i would! these went through a lot of versions (see below) before they became more of who she actually is and less of what i expected her to want.

disney princesses

these are amazing!!!! i just had to share. (all this art was done by viria13). besides the awesome princess hipsters there's a drawing of supernatural - one of my favorite shows. this girl is awesome. and only like, 18. talent.

Graduation

i just placed an order for my niece's graduation announcements. the family couldn't decide on which pictures they liked for the back so i did two versions. i tried to keep it very simple and straight-forward, focusing on the pictures to tell the story. luckily justice decided her theme for graduation was colors. all colors. that tied in extremely well with the photos i took of her while she was in sf visiting. so one of those graffiti shots ended up on the front with 4 others gracing the back. i really like the picture of her with the sunglasses - it's young and fun. and since we were unable to use that for her senior pictures i was happy to be able to include it here. on the front i used the typeface whoopass for her name while the rest (including all on the back) is set in metromix.

catering

here is the website i made for myself. for my catering... uh... business? i don't know that i'd call it a business. i'm not sure what else to call it though. so it's pretty much 2 pages. the landing page has all the details and contact info and a link to the second page, which is the different outfits i can wear. that page is fun because you can click on the color options on the right and the outfit on the left changes to match. fun. also i used the illustration of casey for the outfits page. made her a little heavier and blonde - and there i am ;)

business

i ordered new business cards from moo and they came in today!!!! yay!

there's about 38 different images on the front, with my contact info on the back. i also added the recycling info (the cards are made of 100% recycled post consumer waste, 100% recyclable and biodegradable, FSC & Smartwood certified paper, and manufactured using wind power) because that's very important to me and the city i currently live in.

(note: i just went to moo's website to try and find all the recycle info, to be lazy and not get out one of my cards to find them all. but for some reason i couldn't find all of this information anymore. hmmm... was i just not looking in the right place? or might they have taken this info off their website. because when i was originally designing my cards i took that info word for word from the website. the conspiracy theorist in me wants to think that not all of this info is true and that when they saw my cards come through with all of that info on them, they realized they were falsely advertising it and changed their website. that's probably not what happened but what if?! to the right is the original screen shot i took for reference)

i just had to add share these images. they're beautiful examples of animated .gifs. apparently they don't have to strobe! or have flashing hearts and stars. or look like they just came out of a rave hosted by myspace.  ; )

(blog post where i found them)