DLM Pastry Show Book 2009

Last week was the fifth annual Dorothy Lane Market Pastry Show. This marks the second year that we've done a "book" for the show that features write-ups about the fine pastries, hors d'oeuvres, and beer and wine offered at the event. The book acts as an admission badge and event souvenir.

For this year's theme, I decided to go with "spring watercolors postcards" when I was developing the design for the advertising materials. I had found some awesome watercolor brushes for Illustrator that I was itching to try out, so I played with various combinations of strokes until I achieved that Impressionistic watercolor look that I had envisioned. I then turned the icons for the Eiffel Tower, pastry, and tulip that I'd used in previous years' materials into stamps to tie everything together.

I was surpised by the strong response by our associates to the finished piece: they all just fell in love with the simple design. It is quite a departure from previous years and from all the positive reactions I've heard, a good one at that! To steal a line from the A-Team: "I love it when a good design comes together." :)

Cover:


Inside page:

Doodle Swap

A friend of mine from the HOW Design Forum, Mary, came up with a brilliant idea to do a "doodle swap" on Artist Trading Cards. She described it as: "The Doodle Swap Project is an organized swap of original, trading-card-sized art between artists, designers and illustrators."

It sounded like fun so I signed up. I decided to go with an old standby that I tend to doodle: robots and sci-fi. I just had to give my new Faber-Castel Artist pens a workout, so I figured this would be a great way to use 'em. I tried to stay true to the art of doodling and I warmed up first and then drew directly on the final cards with the pens. I decided to add color with my favorite medium, colored pencil. Alas, the textured vellum was not very forgiving so for the sake of keeping the pen lines visible, I just put a light coating on. Next time I want to give the smooth ATC cards a crack, I think that will work better with the color pencils.

I did a total of nine images, you can view them all on my Flickr. I'm enjoying receiving the cards from my fellow designers in the mail, it's like a mini Christmas with each one that arrives!

You can view the entire Doodle Swap Project on Flickr here.

Below, from my Doodle Swap, "Hello HAL"...

New Zazzle Ts: Designer Math

New t-shirt design available from my Zazzle shop!

If you thought Algebra was hard, then you're probably a designer. We might have a job that's more fun, but our math isn't much easier, just different. Available in Men's and Women's sizes on my Zazzle shop.

T-shirt reads:
Can you place the Illy file into ID and try to either print it from
there or make a PDF and print the PDF?

Can you walk and chew gum at the same time?

Perhaps if you feed it cookies it will be all better? Or better yet,
feed you cookies and come back to it?

Did you export the AI file to make the PSD or JPG? What happens if
you just open the AI file in PSD?

Did you try doing a Save As, deleting the custom fills and seeing if
it will print?

Maybe you could photocopy it instead? :P

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