My friends Matt and Casey got married earlier this year. My wife hosted Casey’s wedding shower and asked me to “design something real quick.” She had planned a shower where all guests would bring a recipe to help the bride jump start her domestic arsenal. Of course, this brought to mind the idealistic housewife from the 1950′s. Also appropriate to that genre was the orange and aqua color combination employed in the design. To top it all off, I tried “baking-in” the imperfections of screen printing into the design. If you look closely, you can see how some of the lettering is a little offset from the background. The final printed product was a 3×5 card to mimic an index card (ya know, for recipes). You may even be able to see the light blue and red rules in the background.

Casey Brewer Wedding Shower Invitation

Casey Brewer Invitation Detail

I’ve already posted about the evolution of the bug-a-roo logo project. Over the last week, that identity grew a little stronger. With a sales event pending, we needed some fresh marketing materials. We’ve always been on a tight budget so instead of spending a lot of money on die-cutting business cards, we’ve just cut a couple of corners off and punched some holes to give the impression of a sales tag. Well, that gets old fast so this was my opportunity to simplify. The solution ended up being implying that tag with shape. However, instead of the drawing the shape of a tag, I just drew the impression of a background. Using a darker shade of the main green pantone color, I added a sliver beneath to imply a shadow. I liked this so much that I carried it over to the brochure.

The brochure was a redesign of something I threw together in about an hour for the last event. Since that was done around midnight, it looked uninteresting. I carried the green color and tag impression over to the brochure to see if I could still use it. It was starting to take shape so I stuck with it.

The previous design had a photograph of my wife holding our son in a baby sling. We didn’t have any more photos on hand so I decided to illustrate the old photo. If you are familiar with Adobe Illustrator, you know that you can click a button and, presto! you have an illustrated image of your photograph. That’s no fun, though. Besides, you get some funky-ness that doesn’t look quite right. If you do it by hand, not only do you get to brag about it, but any funky-ness is your own fault! This took HOURS. I had a blast, though. I worked with a skintone color palette, and created dimensional shapes and patterns to imply depth. It felt like the good ole days of paper and pencil. 

This illustration technique had been on my mind quite a bit. I had wanted to do something similar for bug-a-roo for a long time but didn’t have the opportunity until now. We’ll see if it shows up again. Again, that is the beauty of taking your time to develop a visual identity.

Illustration example

Well, I have to sign off because I have to be Mr. Mom so my wife can go sell these products. We’ll see how it goes. Check her blog out and order stuff from her: slings-and-things.blogspot.com.

One of the curses of being a graphic designer is that EVERYTHING must have a logo. The good thing about that is that you can develop your wife’s side business into a brand. We began with a quick, rough logo. My wife refuses to capitalize anything so naturally, the logo would be all lower case. I thought the brand should reflect her care-free, cheerful personality so rather than searching for the right font, I sketched the type with Illustrator’s pencil tool (when’s the last time you used that one?). I fashioned a quick outline of a bug in the background and called it a day. It worked for a little while but I started cringing every time she asked me to print her some more business cards. 

I began sketching ideas for a revision. I came up with some great concepts but was having trouble translating it into crisp, clean vector lines. As a designer who prefers those wonderful vector lines to their jaggy raster counterparts, I had to resist the temptation to scan the sketches and start tracing. That’s cheating isn’t it? Well, after several frustrating attempts, I fired up my Epson and started tracing.

This process has really opened a lot of possibilities for me. I realized that no matter how complicated the idiosyncratic anomalies of hand drawn images are, they have to break down into simple lines at some level. This could only strengthen my design skills. One of the complaints about the vector preference is that things tend to be too neat. It would be great to master the ability to force vectors to behave and look more like rasters (without the scanning, of course). All of this comes from a distain for the size and color limitations you have with a raster image. 

Anyhoo, the results were quite nice. I ended up with a lovely logo for my wife that reflects her personality and business. You can see the process below. For gift ideas for moms and moms-to-be, visit bug-a-roo.

Original Bug-a-roo logo

A Sketch

Another Sketch

THE Sketch

Bug-a-roo Logo