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

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