Little Miss Phone Wallpapers

Way back when my fiancé got her first smartphone I created a custom background wallpaper for her. It was an original Motorola Droid and she had a pink case on it. I created “Little Miss Droid” which was inspired by the Little Miss and Mr. Men books.

When it came time to power down her Droid for the last time and move to her brand-spanking-new iPhone, she was a little sad to see Little Miss Droid leave her life. She named her iPhone “Little Miss iPhone” and I knew she would love it if I made a new wallpaper for her. I finally finished it this past weekend and I’m really happy with how it turned out. There isn’t a “Mr. iPhone” for myself yet, but that is definitely on my to-do list.

Little Miss wallpapers on the phones

 

Designing a Wedding Part 2

If you haven’t seen Designing a Wedding Part 1, I went over how we got started with our invitations. After that design hurdle was jumped, we moved on to our website. Wedding websites are all over the place these days and there are plenty of free templates to get you started. Because we already established a very unique look (compared to a traditional wedding at least) we opted to design our site from the ground up.

abbyandchristopher.com homepage

We started with a splash or welcome page. It very closely resembles our invitation design but with more simplified information. We added our links to bottom to allow our visitors to get to the more specific information they’re looking for.

Our Story webpage

We tried to keep it simple and had only five links. We did one for our story which gives a little background on how we met and how our relationship developed. There’s a page for the locations of our venues with convenient links to maps and directions on how to get there. An accommodation section lists nearby hotels. We decided that an online RSVP form would be more convenient for guests and us (a win-win you might say). The back-end of that is powered by Google Forms. I was able to completely customize the look, which I discussed in this earlier post. Finally, we added a page with links to our gift registries.

locations page of our wedding website

The “secondary” pages all have the same design. They use the top from our invitations and homepage and turn it into a unifying header. The links turn into a simple menu to the left to allow visitors to navigate from page to page very easily.

The whole design is very simple and compliments our invitations very nicely. The invitation directs recipients to the site so we thought it was important to give a unified experience. While it’s not massive or even very complicated, I think it turned out to be a nice little site with all the relevant information easily accessible.

We haven’t made it this far but I do hope to incorporate the designs into our program and thank you notes. As those progress I’ll throw up another post about them. I always think it’s fun to see a whole design package and how all the pieces fit together and this particular project has been extra special for me. I hope you’ve enjoyed this look at our wedding design process.

Designing a Wedding Part 1

As previously mentioned, I’ll be getting married this June. My fiance and I are both graphic designers, so it was only natural for us to design an identity for our wedding. Any designer will tell you designing for yourself is harder than for any client. As you can imagine, having two designers design for themselves is even worse. It took us quite a while to turn our visions into reality but we eventually managed.

Close up of wedding invitations

It started with invitations. We knew we wanted something different. Something a lot less traditional and a lot more “us.” I think we definitely accomplished it. We opted for a single card design done in letterpress. You can see a bit of the actual printing process in my earlier post about the press check. I’m really happy with how they look. The colors, the texture and even the bright orange envelopes all look great together. You can see more pictures below.

stacks of envelopes and wedding invitations

In part two I’ll go into how we translated our invitation designs into a wedding website.

Minimalist TV Posters

Two of my passions are design and TV. It’s rare that I’m not watching at least five TV shows at any given moment. I’m not just a couch potato, I’m a multi-tasker. Anytime I’m surfing the web or working on a project there’s a good chance the TV is on.

The Simpsons Knight Rider  MacGyver Poster

So with TV being such a big part of my everyday and design being my livelihood, I was totally psyched to find this great poster series from Albert Exergian. I first saw them probably a year ago. The posters are wonderful. They really capture the spirit and feeling of each show with so few elements. I geeked over them for a while and then they slowly faded away to the back of my mind. That is until today, when I came across this other great poster series.

Lost Poster Daria Poster Veronica Mars Poster Mad Men Poster

This time it became a guessing game which added a new element of fun. I love that each poster has three icons to represent the show and no words or titles. I love seeing what elements the designers thought were most important. It’s almost like a really pretty game of Pictionary. It was their shout out to the original set of posters that reminded me about them. I like both sets very much, for different reasons and hope you enjoyed them too. Make sure you check out the full series (and the answers) over at re:blog.

Letterpress Wedding Invitation Press Check

Last night Abby and I had the pleasure of doing a press check on our wedding invitations. We are having them printed at Ginger Tree Press which is a one person letterpress & design studio in Kalamazoo. It’s actually owned and operated by our friend Anna who went through the same design program as us in college. I’ve always loved letterpress and when the opportunity to do our wedding invites that way presented itself, we couldn’t say no. It’s always nice to keep things local and because we knew Anna, she invited us for a press check. After checking the color and such, we stuck around to watch some of the printing. It was extremely exciting for a couple of design nerds like us. Anna really knows her stuff so if you’re looking for letterpress, definitely check out Ginger Tree Press.

I love just about everything about letterpress. I love the look of it. I love the texture. I love how it feels in your hand. There’s something very pleasing about it. I think it’s extra special. Maybe because I know what went into it behind the scenes, but I just can’t get enough of it.

Below I have a few photos and videos of our sneak peek at the invitations. They are looking really great and I can’t wait to see the final product all trimmed out with the second color in place. I’ll be sure to post them when they’re ready.

 

 

CityMaps Shows You What’s Nearby with Logos

A while ago About Foursquare reported on a really cool new map service called CityMaps. They’re billing it as “the social map” because it’s connected to a number of social media services like Twitter and foursquare. What I find most interesting was the inclusion of logos on the maps instead of just names. As a designer I’ve got a soft spot for logos so an entire map full of them makes me smile. I think it’s a really unique way to convey the information. In a lot of ways, it’s a lot more useful too. If I’m looking for the nearest Starbucks or McDonald’s, their logos are going to pop out at me much quicker than just their names. In this day and age logos are so recognizable that this approach seems to make perfect sense. I’m actually a little surprised this hasn’t happened sooner.

an example CityMap of San Francisco

Beyond just the unique logo integration, they pull in foursquare tips and recent tweets. It’s a really great mashup of social information on top of a nice looking map. Right now they just have maps for New York, San Francisco and Austin but there are more on the way. There is even an iPhone app so you can enjoy CityMaps on the go. With all of that info combined together it really shows just how powerful APIs can be. I think they’re trying to make it a useful “explore your city” services but so far I don’t think it has much on foursquare. I’ll be keeping an eye on CityMaps because it’s already cool and has so much potential to become even better.

Meaki is Pinterest for Web Designers

Pinterest is quite a big deal right now. It’s branched out beyond just ladies pinning crafts and has even become popular with companies and sports teams. I’ve had an account for a while and I think it’s a great services. It’s a great way to keep track of cool stuff you find on the net. That said, I don’t use it. It doesn’t fill the one need I really wanted to use it for, pinning websites. On Pinterest, you’d need to screenshot a website, then upload that screenshot and paste in the link of the website. That’s a lot of work just to pin a cool looking webpage. After that realization, I pretty much pushed Pinterest aside and all but forgot about pinning.

Enter Meaki. It does exactly what I was looking for. Instead of just pinning a single image from a website, it actually pins the whole site. It’s perfect for web designers. I often come across websites with a cool feel or a neat trick that I’d like to remember for later. Inspiration is all over the web and as a designer it’s nice to have a collection of said inspiration easily accessible when your next project comes along. Meaki makes that easy. You just get their “Clip-it” bookmarklet and then “clip” any cool websites you come across. When you go back to your collections on the Meaki website you can see the whole site you clipped, not just an image from it.

A possible issue I see is what happens if a site makes changes after you’ve clipped it? Does Meaki actually save the site when you capture it or just embed the site? I haven’t been using it long yet but so far Meaki is a very promising service and I think it will fit in to my workflow quite nicely. I could even see creating a collection of sites for a particular project and then sharing that with a client as an online mood board. While their interface isn’t quite as slick as Pinterest yet, Meaki is still a very young service so I expect it to get better over time. It might not ever gain the widespread and mainstream success of Pinterest but I think within the niche market of web designers (and those who prefer visual bookmarks), Meaki could really take off.

Swiss inspired punk posters

A few months back I discovered this awesome ongoing project by graphic designer Mike Joyce called swissted. I instantly fell in love with it. They’re all absolutely beautiful and combine such a great design style to all of these great bands. They’re simple and colorful and wonderfully pieced together. I have to give big props to Mike Joyce for these. It’s really inspirational to see such a cool project that someone does just for themselves. The  It’s really hard to pick just one favorite but here are a few examples. Be sure to check out the swissted site and see them all.