Wedding season is coming! And dang, I am excited about some stuff I am cookin’ up! I will post the whole suite after the event but for now, I’ll leave you with this:

I love wedding invitations!

4x6: victory

So, let’s get started on that Transparency of why I do the things I do things RIGHT NOW.

For the 4×6 series, I tend to work on a bunch at one time and then dole them out week by week. Today’s is actually from a batch I posted awhile ago (Rotary, 4w350m3 & Keyhole). It all started with the font— VTKS Dear Love! I have collected many fonts over the years but my favorite free font site is definitely DaFont.com. Sometimes, I go wandering around there to get inspired & VTKS Dear Love definitely inspired me. I love the letterforms and have been really interested in using them in the abstract lately. Type is such a beautiful element that often goes unnoticed because, well, you’re reading the words and not looking at the type!

I’ve been playing with abstracted letters with this particular font and was selecting the individual letterforms that I found pleasing and started playing with them—size, placement, angle, cropping etc. Now, obviously, this V is not at all abstract and certainly reads not only as type but also as text. Having just the letter V floating around didn’t make much sense to me so I started thinking about words that start with the letter v & that’s how the phrase came about (I must have also been feeling a little victorious at the time!). The phrase “is for victory” is set in a different font because VTKS Dear Love—as lovely as it is— really is too busy to set a sentence in. It probably works best as a single word or a drop cap or initial(as I’ve done here).

I’ve been on a stripe kick sartorially and a bumblebee color scheme design-wise. Yellow is such a lovely, vibrant color that I have a hard time wearing so I might use it a little too frequently in my designs. It just makes me happy!

That’s my first explanation/why I do the things I do for you. I hope you enjoyed it & it didn’t bore you to tears! Let me know what you think—both of the explanation and the design! Constructive discussion and critical questions are welcome.

Oooh! A new series!?
Yup: it’s just a little section that will be updates on whatever I’ve been working on lately. It might be design, fine art or crafting. It will just be another little peek into my visual world and a request for a peek into yours! What have you been working on? Post links, pictures, etc in the comments and tell me what you’re up to, what the next steps are? Is it finished? Still in progress? Let’s help keep one another’s creative balls rolling.

Whatcha workin’ on?
For the first installment, I’d love to show you a quick little template that I created for my friend Hillary’s blog (byhillary.com) for her new series: Colour with a u

She wanted to illustrate color palettes (like Tonal Tuesdays!) for her lovely readers and described her design aesthetic as “Bauhaus with bunnies” and here’s what I came up with. She needed something that she could easily edit in photoshop without much mush or fush. So I created a simple black and white design that she would be able to change out super easy. She has a 3 & 5 color template. Go see it in action!

For byhillary.com: Colours with a u: 5 color palette.

For byhillary.com: Colours with a u: 3 color palette.

For byhillary.com: click through to see it in action!

What’re you up to?

Julie & Scott get hitched.

I think this was the most enjoyable part about wedding planning (other than tasting cupcakes, of course!).

Scott & I have fairly different aesthetics so it was a fun challenge to mesh them together. Obviously, I lean towards the retro-adorable side and he leans more toward modern-awesome.

More invitation goodness after the jump! Continued…

nomnomnom.

New pattern for the tops of the shipping statement & will most likely have many other applications in the near future. Two packages to ship tomorrow with new goodies enclosed. Mostly, stickers with cupcakes on them. Rottencupcakes, of course!