Travelling Treasures - Exhibit Design

A full year of work has finally finished.
Blood, sweat, and tears (both literal and figurative) went into this.
Funny how this big ol' booklet caused so many troubles.

It was a challenge getting started. I knew from the start that if I wanted things to go smoothly I had to get the identity of the exhibit organized... and it just wouldn't cooperate. I ended up designing the whole thing without an identity in mind, which tortured me a little. Eventually I had enough similarities in the pieces that I could put together a solid explanation of how the identity would work, and rework everything to suit what I had come up with.

Lesson learned: identity design takes forever. Sometimes it's better to wing it and build the identity out of the pieces of the project that really work.

Business Cards

I might be addicted to those multicoloured droplets.
Just a little. I can quit whenever I want! Honest!

Pax

Had a rather long bout of creativity (read: desperation to do something other than design) the other night. We're talking 6pm to 2am sort of creativity. I'd never drawn something directly into the computer before (successfully, anyway). She started out as a random face on a very tiny canvas in Photoshop and eventually spawned into a massive vector poster. I'd say the 8 hours of fiddling (and severe hand cramps) was worth it.

Book Design - Steam

After many hissy fits and several threats to give up entirely I finally finished my book.
PHEW. Am I ever glad that ordeal is over.

I wrote the entire manuscript. Something I never want to do again. I'll be quite happy letting actual authors do the dirty work from now on.

It's got a faux-leather cover, red endpapers, a red ribbon, several stamps (that alternate between gold stamped or blind stamped) on the cover and spine, and a red bellyband (with another gold stamp). You wish you had one of these. They're actually kind of snuggly, if I book can be snuggly.

I won't go into all the drama of the making of this monster.
Needless to say it caused much undue stress and plenty of sleepless nights.

Typeface Design

I invented a typeface!
Am I excited about it? Oh yes. Very. Typing doesn't do this justice.

We spent the entire term sketching, refining, and eventually kerning (that was a huge pain and I doubt I'll ever be finished with the kerning) our respective typefaces.

Other than the actual invention of the typeface we had to create a promotional piece of some sort to help advertise. This is the promotional piece for mine (one of the two - the second suffered through a rather terrible photoshoot and I haven't salvaged a picture of it just yet).
It's a roughly 36" long, accordion-fold, type specimen (and a huge pain in my butt).
Nobody wants to print one copy of a 36" x 5.5" student project. 500 of them sure. But not one.

Other than the usual printing-as-a-student drama I love this. I love the typeface. I love life.
It still needs a lot of work. It's a working typeface (I had a little joy fit when I first typed with it) but it still needs a lot of technical refinement.

The missing thing (which you'll see as soon as I fix the pictures) is a little rocket ship that was a companion piece to the big folded specimen. It was full of white chocolate wafers that had the entire alphabet (upper and lower case) carved into the faces.

Bridal Shower Invitation

An invitation I made for Lauren's bridal shower.
Got to love the fun things you can find in Illustrator when you dig around in the file lists.

La Girandole Advertisement

Another of the projects I worked on at my internship. La Girandole is a regular customer at PIGI. The sales staff wanted their advertisement for studio space rentals to look a little better than the usual Word-document ads that show up on bulletin boards (even though that's exactly where it was going to be posted).

In the end they even used it as a full page ad at the back of this year's summer/fall dance class brochure.

It drives me a TINY bit crazy that we couldn't quite get the widows and orphans in the type to cooperate, but we just didn't have too many options for moving things around. There was a very specific format to follow.