The seal to the left is how I’ve spent lots of my day (After a gloriously long sleep-in). A girl at work is getting married in November and she sent of a brief to a graphic designer who returned something less than adequate (Like really not good at all) and out of the generosity of my heart or stupidity of my impulsion, I offed to have a stab at doing better.
Basically what she is after is a seal with a crane and a bull, this reflects her and her fiance’s surnames – the rope which I originally dumped there as a ‘circular thing of vague interest’ now has to stay there as she is passionate about sailing and decided she wanted to keep it.
So my very vague crappy raster file version scored me the necessity of producing a vector edition. As much as I like live-trace in Illustrator, it really is inadequate most of the time which means everything by hand is SLOW. I have had very limited experience with Adobe Illustrator and the creation of vector files so it was good to have a crack at something that has a useful end result.
Text paths around curves are strange and although the top-right-left text are on the same path, the bottom one couldn’t be (due to vertical orientation of the text) and I’m still not 100% if it’s quite in the right spot.
Anyhoo, that’s what I came up with. It may not be fantastic big – it looks alright small (which is what she’ll potentially be using it for). I’m not getting paid for it, but I might get some paid ‘laying-out’ work from her for the rest of the invitation and if she uses it, I will get full copies of the invites for my folio. Inroads are good and I learnt a few things!