Design Quickie: Certified Potato (Sticker)

I’m not sure who, when, where, or why the term “potato” became synonymous with a person who views themself as plain/boring/ugly/whatever, but I’m here for it.

And to show my pride as a potato myself, I designed this sticker that reads: “Certified Potato”.

Don’t worry—all of my future blog posts will not be just sticker designs and silly things. I do have some actual work waiting to come out of the pipeline (final stretch, you know?), mostly logo design with some layout stuff mixed in. It’s coming, I promise.

Design Quickie: What Thit HEO?! (Sticker)

EDIT: Stickers are now available for purchase!

I grew up in a bilingual household. My mom is originally from Vietnam and speaks, well, Vietnamese. My (late) dad was born and raised in Philly and spoke Philadelphese—you know, stoop, crick, wooder, hoagie. All dem jawns.

On my mom’s side, all of the ladies speak with poise. Their English may not be that great, but they try and I can understand each of them quite well. The men, on the other hand, also try, but they try hard. So hard, in fact, they also learned to speak Philadelphese…ish.

This sticker design, which makes me laugh heartily every time I say it aloud, is an homage to my Vietnamese uncles and any other AZN bad boy who always lets one slip when the time’s right: WHA THIT HEO?!

So, unless you’re familiar with what any sort of Asian accent sounds like (I’m really nodding my head at Vietnamese and Chinese), then these words won’t make sense.

I’ll break it down:

• Wha = what

• Thit = the/tha (if you also speak Philadelphese) (FUN FACT: “thit” as a Vietnamese word means “meat”.)

• Heo = H-E-double-hockey-sticks, hell

what•thit•HEO?!

Design Quickie: Make it POP!

EDIT: Stickers are now available for purchase!

A running joke between creatives is how clients, who are not well-versed in designer vernacular, will often try to overdescribe what they want as compensation for not knowing how.

Other times, they’ll use power or action words in lieu of what we would use.

The most popular is, “Make it POP!”, sometimes phrased as a question, “Can you make it pop?”

To celebrate this, I made a sticker design for today’s design quickie.

The one on the left was my first draft, but to simplify it and make it a little easier on the eyes, I turned it into the one on the right. Both are annoying, just not equally. Trying to decide if I’ll turn this into a sticker. (You’ll be the first ones to know when and if I do.)

MakeitPOP

Design Quickie: Bitch, Où? (Sticker)

I made a friend on Twitter who is de Montréal.

My username is @parlerfranglais…which, in terrible, made up French means “speaks Frenglish”. And then, I did exactly what my username says: I spoke Frenglish with her.

But it’s OK—although she titled herself a Montréal bitch, her French is a little questionable as well. She much prefers to parler anglais (I know, I didn’t conjugate “parler”. De rien), so for a small bit, we sat on either end of our connection, typing out really bad French to each other.

And then, we went back to parler-ing anglais.

But one day, she tweeted about being ugly (I kid you not), to which I replied, “I’m ugly every day.” To which she replied, “Bitch, OÙ?”

For my non-Francophones/non-parlerfranglais-ers, “où” is French for “where”.

Bitch, where?

I laughed a little too hard at it, and told her, “I’m going to make that into a sticker.”

And so I did.

Well.

It’s designed. It hasn’t yet been printed, but once it is, there will be an update!

P.S. Look at it fast enough, and it’ll look like, bitch, oui? “Oui” is French for “yes”. Basically, it will always be franglais.

Design Quickies: This is NOT My City (Album Cover)

My younger cousin is intelligent as hell, funny, witty, and 100% her own person. She has her BS (no jokes, please) in Architectural Preservation from TU (what, what) and is working on her MS in Library and Information Science at DU. She’s awesome.

With that said, she also has some of the most quotable one-liners known to man.

One Christmastime (I guarantee it was last year), my boyfriend, and two cousins took a trip out to Bethlehem, PA to visit the annual Christkindlmarkt over in Christmas City. On the way to and from, Yenny kept firing off these phrases that were responses to things we were talking, about, but totally left of center, yet completely on brand. It got so funny with what she was spewing out, I started a new page of notes on my phone just for those sentences.

I said aloud, “Yen, all of these sound like song titles. This can be an EP.” We all laughed about it, and of course she questioned me as she always does. To be fair, though, some of these titles are not things that have physically spilled out of her mouth, but are definitely things she wouldn’t hesitate to say or that relate to her quite well.

WELL, almost a year later, I finally got around to making it happen. Now, this is entirely an inside joke, and for Christmas, to celebrate the “one year anniversary” of these quotes, my boyfriend suggested we get the album cover printed as an LP and instead of a record inside, create a photo album just for her. I think it’s a smashing idea!

I sent a screenshot of the front and back covers to her older sister, who was in the car (she was driving!) when all of this took place and she got a kick out of it. Even told me she’d have to nudge her sister to pre-order it. ;)

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Elements:

  1. Photo of Yen - taken by me at 2018 Wawa Welcome America Party on the Parkway, Philadelphia, PA

  2. Alley stock photo found on Google

  3. Typefaces used: Rock Salt, Myriad

  4. FBI Anti-Piracy Warning logo (downloaded as SVG from Brands of the World)

  5. Republic Records logo (downloaded from Google)

  6. Parental Advisory logo (downloaded from Google)

Time taken: 2 hours

Programs: Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop

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