Category: <span>Design</span>

Published July 22, 2007 by

Bed Head

craigslist-furniture-by-kristiana-parn.jpgSaturday, Anne (Geoff’s mum) and I wandered into Kmart in search of a doona cover and there they lay, a stack of Harry Potter books – ignored, a mere 30 minutes after the manic rush.

Anne, Ron and later just Geoff and I spent the next few hours… morning… afternoon looking at three trillion home shops in search of a bed.

Logic goes: Geoff moves on Saturday why not buy a big bed now rather than move his single one and have to deal with it all later. I get a ‘say’ in that I have to like it in 6mths which complicates things probably by 200 because I’m a picky one and can’t seem to help it.

So much for that. After spending hours and hours and hours we left it for Sunday to ‘think on it’ (It = one of the few price worthy in hundreds of no-go’s).

This afternoon we returned preparing to buy it and be done with it, only to be left in mental foetal positions. There was a gaping awning where the bed should’ve been. Nothing. Gone. No red sticker. Just gone.

A rush to Ikea – which is a fair hike, we returned with 1/3 of a bed – the rest to be delivered tomorrow.

Frustrating.

Budget and choicey don’t go together. It’s harder to cater for two tastes. I think though, that I was probably the biggest problem with that.

Design Life

Published July 17, 2007 by

Kristiana Parn

cuddlefish_eating_candy_kristiana_parn.jpgI might be using a few images of Kristiana Parn in the next little while as my ‘blog setters’.

Do check out her illustration/drawings, they are whimsical and just plain cute.

I wish I could draw.

Like really really wish I could draw.

Design

Published July 12, 2007 by

First paid design work

smalllogo1.jpgRemember this? I designed the seal (voluntarily with motive) for a girl at work’s wedding invites.

This little piece of volunteer work has gotten me some paid real work! This is, I think, the first of lot of specific design work that I am getting paid for. I am now in charge of doing the rest of their invites, fairly standard stuff like layout – the logo itself will still be there and I think it is getting embossed.

Now the trepidation of being totally inept to appease my own perfectionist eye. This of course is irrational but lurking. I’m just hoping she’ll be more than satisfied with the outcome.

I get full printed copies of everything for my folio/record. Yipee!

While I’m on this, I have been looking around at printers/paper for doing our invites. Any tip-off’s would be fantastic. Any reasonably priced printers that you know? Also, if anyone knows where to get cream coloured card (Nice weight but not solid) wholesale for equivalent to less than $1 a sheet. That’d be nice. Don’t say Ebay.

Design Wedding

Published June 25, 2007 by

Vector Games

smalllogo1.jpgThe 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!

Design

Published June 24, 2007 by

New Zealand at my front door

jane_gray_lookingatyourself.jpgI discourteously did Onno Knuvers the dishonor of not linking to his website (Due to my use of an image of his in the previous post). So I must do that now.

He is – from my reading – a Dutchy (a very good start!) turned New Zealander. And by a further glance he has some very cute and clever little illustrations. Not meaning to suck-up to nullify my ‘crime’, but I did really rather appreciate this one. (And I can hear Geoff saying in my head, ‘No you’re not sucking up at all!’, in his amused/sarcastic way – scary that!)

So there’s the first New Zealander – at my online front door.

The second lot are at my actual front door. In fact they’ve been living in our rather minute lounge room the past two nights. My lovely housemate’s doing (Who, quite realistically and honestly is a much nicer person than I am). Our lounge room, as tight as it is, is a fraction more comfortable than this couple’s car.

Isobelle (housemate) met them at the free meal my church puts on a couple of weeks in a row. Very nice couple. They’ve fairly recently moved across and yesterday fantastically both managed to score full-time jobs which was fairly important. They are now living in a tent in our front-yard.

Why am I sharing this some what more personal-to-them thing? A couple of reasons.

a) So I can ridiculously claim I’ve got New Zealanders at both my online and offline front doors and that collates into a nice easy blog title.

but more seriously,

b) So that I can remind myself of the crap that’s been sifting through my head and some less than perfect attitudes I have towards these kinds of things.

Conversations of late at: Vocare, Young Adults and with those around me etc. have been quite centered around money. This situation in it’s own way has allowed it to hit home.

I have so much freaking stuff.

image by Jane Gray

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