Design Quickies - Gotta Go Fast!

Over the summer, I needed a creative kickstart. I felt like my portfolio was lacking and I was the only one who could do anything about it…but what?

So that’s when I got this idea—what if I, before I started my work day each morning, got on the computer and just opened a program, picked a skill to refine and spend 1-2 hours working on a quick project. I dubbed these “Design Quickies”.

These Design Quickies, or DQs for short, had three jobs: keep myself in practice or learn how to do something new, build up my portfolio, and keep my creative juices flowing. My job, at the time of this conception, allowed me more creative release than the last, but was not nearly enough to keep me happy as a designer.

I kept up with this for a little while, trying to add humor to my work. I experimented with size and scale (as shown in the two examples on the left), type treatment, color, and ideas. Each session, I’d do a web search for random things that popped into my head, gather the items I’d need and go to town. The only rule was each DQ could only be worked on during that session. Once the session was over, I would never touch the piece again.

Needless to say, a few pieces remain unfinished, like the family portrait I took form my personal photo library and attempted to replace everyone’s face, including my own, with Gary Busey’s.

I’ll pick DQs back up soon, as I have a few things I want to try out. They’ll be shared in the blog in the future and will possibly earn a spot in the portfolio if they really rock my socks.

Sunflower Wedding

One of my best friends’ sisters was getting married and naturally, I was on the top of the list for people to get invitations from.

It started with a casual mention over lunch, to me emailing a questionnaire to the bride-to-be asking about colors, themes, dates, etc.

What I got to work with: purple, white, gray and sunflowers.

Because the bride lives in Florida, all of this was done through email and text: choosing the paper, designing the concepts, the fleshing out, the final layout, the progress updates and photos of the finished product.

The layout design was done on the computer and I handed off printing to a friend of mine who has access to a large format flatbed printer. Ten sheets of 26” x 40” paper from Mohawk, dozens of sheets of purple shimmer paper and vellum from The Paper Store, several hours spent with a 15” guillotine and a basic X-Acto, going blind in low light, double-stick paper craft tape, some letratac, and it all came together.

The package consisted of save the dates (not pictured), main invites, vellum cover sheets, directions, RSVP cards, and gift notes—envelopes were the bride’s responsibility in this case.

This was probably one of my favorite hand-crafted projects and I look forward to taking on more just like this. The bride was super easy to work with and I hope her wedding planning is going just as smoothly. I’m also looking forward to attending the wedding to see how everything turns out!

Emchi Social Media

While driving through town one day, my boyfriend and I noticed a new nail salon had opened up. From the outside, it looked big, well-lit and really nice. The following weekend, I made an appointment.

Walking in, I was impressed—the color theme inside was pristine white, black and crystal. They looked to be full-service - hair, nails, makeup, the works! Every nail station was occupied, and a good number of the massage chairs for pedicures had a content customer seated, receiving their seemingly much needed ped pampering session.

A few minutes after signing in for my appointment, I was called to a station where I met one of the co-owners, named Peter, who was also happy working in the salon as a nail tech. After talking with him for a little bit, he learned that I’m half Vietnamese and could speak broken Viet. He, elated with this situation, began telling everyone around him about me and a relationship was formed. One of my appointments, sadly was not with Peter, but with a woman named Nicole with whom I would soon develop a different relationship—a working relationship.

Peter, his wife, and Nicole were working on a very important project: their own line of dip powder, a new, but popular, product in nail salons. They needed a designer to help with social media ads to promote Emchi (Vietnamese for little sister). In talking with Nicole, I told her what I did for a living and she asked for my phone number. I left her with a personal business card and from there we took off.

I designed the ads for every demo day, holiday, trade show, convention and anything they needed visual content for. These layouts went on their Instagram and Facebook to alert people of what, when, and where and it seemed to work for them because they kept emailing me back.

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Wine Bar

While working at the sign shop, I met a woman who was an important part of the company, although she was not an employee, manager or co-owner. Rather, she was a family friend who helped with the finance stuff and would occasionally bring the shop some work.

One of the projects she brought along was for us to build a custom over-the-door sign for the wine bar in a restaurant owned by a friend of hers.

She spoke with my boss, then came to me with her idea, giving me full rights to creativity. This is what I came up with, approval soon following.

The idea was to take the top portion of a barrel (imagine taking a large wine barrel and cutting just below the top band) and turning it into a custom sign with 3-D elements such as laser- and router-cut and painted acrylic letters and shapes affixed to the surface with studs and adhesive.

Unfortunately, the plan fell through, so we were never able to bring this sign to life. It sits memorialized in its 2-D state in my portfolio.

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This was designed while I was employed at Urban Sign & Crane, Inc.

NBA Lockout 2011

During my internship at The Onion, I saw and heard many crazy stories in and out of media, one of which was the infamous NBA Lockout of 2011: 161 days of NO BASKETBALL because of a lack of agreement on a luxury tax and a salary cap.

SO, why not use this as a headline for a great, informative, and ridiculously funny headline for America’s Finest News Source?

As one of the design interns, I was tasked with handling the design of a new NBA logo to reflect the lockout. This was probably one of the more fun designs I was asked to come up with and I was quite proud of it. The graphics editors were smitten and we were prepared to send everything to print, according to the writing staff.

The day before we were going to press, however, December 8, 2011, the lockdown ended, thus making our headline null and void. We had to pull the headline from the paper and quickly replace it with something else. My logo never got printed in the weekly edition, but was published and archived with the article on The Onion’s website. You can read it here.