Olive & Page Summer Sale
July 12, 2010
Just finished a bit of event branding for Olive & Page’s Summer Sale. Olive & Page is a paper-loving and real-ink-pressing sister company to Martha Cooper Design.
Come join the fun — there are really beautiful letterpress cards for a steal at www.olivepage.com.
/// MPC
Quack, a crafty project
June 28, 2010Every once in a while I get a wild hair and do some sort of 19th-century handmaiden-type project, usually involving hot pink sewing thread or baking chocolate. Not sure where this impulse comes from, but perhaps it has to do with the fact that my two-year-old does not like it when I sit in front of the computer. Here is my newest doodle: Quack.
I sewed over the felt many times with swooping lines to mimic the motion of water and to nail down the shapes. At the bottom, hard to see, are fish:
At this point in my post, I would normally explain the rationale, the deep thinking behind this brilliant creative concept. But today, it’s just: Quack! My daughter likes ducks.
Identity, Logo & Website Redesign!
June 13, 2010I am so excited about my new logo, identity and website I can hardly stand it.
I wonder if most of this elation is actually relief, because this is the result of a very long journey indeed — like hiking up a tall mountain, in winter, barefoot.
Hell and death, it is hard to design your own identity. The writer/designer’s blocks! The self-doubt! No matter what came into my head, I would dismiss it as being too quaint or cheesy or boring or inappropriate. No wonder people hire someone else to design their logo. It’s downright impossible to self-analyze and self-promote, and not be self-crippling. I think it took me a year of hemming and hawing, but finally, here it is: new logo, new identity, new website. Hurrah!
Thanks so much to Otis at Example 7 for doing his PHP-CSS-Wordpress magic; he’s endlessly patient, ultra-professional, enthusiastic, and just about the nicest guy you’ve ever met.
WordPress! What a miracle. Client’s say it’s easy to update, coders say it’s easy to tweak, and designers say “what a relief!” because the final site looks as it was meant to, instead of having to make design concessions to the code.
And finally, thanks so much to my design group for giving me great feedback when asked: Viv, Jillian, Heidi, Rena, you’re all the best. To anyone already on their own or looking at going independent, I highly recommend meeting with a group of your peers monthly to trade ideas, critique each others’ work, moan about the economy, share vendors. It has been a truly inspirational force in my professional life, and I can’t imagine not having that kind of community to look forward to.
Carberry Club banner
June 11, 2010I volunteered to do a banner for The Carberry Club, a Brown alumni group here in the Bay Area. Although I’m not an illustrator, as is clear in the image below, I had fun doing it!
The Carberry Club is a more intimate alumni group than, say, the Northern California Alumni Association; it’s more casual and highlights intimate dinners of alumni and their friends. This group has a special interest in networking entrepreneurs and start-ups. So if you’re a Brown alum in the Bay Area, come on down.
Tutti Foodie
May 24, 2010Our client Tutti Foodie, who runs a website and puts out a weekly email compendium of news all about food, also creates and manages sweepstakes and contests. One of the contests we did together was the Chocolate Adventure Contest with Scharffen Berger Chocolate. We designed postcards, web banners, trade show graphics, you name it. And what’s best of all, Tutti Foodie sent us chocolate at the end! Thanks, TF!
Here is the postcard:
Some web banners:
Tuttifoodie also ran an Australian Wine Lovers Sweepstakes — a trip to Australia to tour vineyards with three friends! We can support that. MCD came up with the concept of the animal most closely associated with Australia, the kangaroo, stamped on a wine cork emerging from a bottle of wine. The color palette evokes red wine and warm desert.
Went to the San Francisco Public Library…
May 12, 2010If you ever want to throw yourself back to the days before the internet, try spending some time at your local library. Some of them are still open, and some of them still have books! The Main San Francisco Library also has an amazing resource for image makers of all sorts: the Picture Files. There, on the fourth floor, lie many file cabinets full of copyright-free images that generations of librarians have been cutting out of magazines and sticking in labeled file folders. It’s really quite a feat; the list of just the titles of the folders comes to about 30 pages in itself. Check out what I found under “New York City — Street Life”:
Why, it’s the Babies Fourth of July Procession in New York City! They don’t look too happy, do they?
I have been doing a lot of drawing lately for various projects, although I don’t consider myself an illustrator. Here is my approximation of Central Park:
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And, swans:
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