Happy New Year, 2012!

As we all stumble back to work today I wanted to take a minute to wish everyone a very Happy New Year! I wish you prosperity, joy, laughter, success and happiness for this year and more. 2011 was a whirlwind of a year for me. There were hardships, difficulties, sadness but also resilience, strength and love. Most of that is personal but from that came a rebirth and a chance to start anew. In 2011 I returned to more full-time work with my notable clients EFS, Alex Shakar and Mauricio Calero Photography. And 2011 marks the year of my first print publication with the illustrations I did for Shakar's Luminarium. I also made a mental note to learn more, keep up with industry news and trends, get in touch with peers and mentors, and delve into the design & dev community in Toronto.

2012 will be more of that and I hope more work and more wonderful clients. As the year begins I already have some small projects for a couple of clients and January will be a busy month for me. January 2012 marks the launch of Mission US - Mission 2 "Flight to Freedom" on January 24th. I'm so excited to be able to finally show you what I've been working on for most of 2011! Be on the lookout for more soon!

Next week I will be speaking at a local high school to kids about design and development and how to leverage your skills to build the career you want. I'm also scheduled to help with Ladies Learning Code in Toronto for their January workshops. LLC is a relatively new initiative to help females learn about technology and programming, something I have recently become passionate about.

On the list this month is also a complete redesign of my website portfolio and this blog. I've decided that I want to consolidate my website and blog so that they are both easily accessible and people can come to one place to find all of my information. I have had this redesign in the back of my mind for the last half of 2011 but haven't had the time to buckle down and get it done. This will be a bit of a challenge as I want to redesign it and my mind changes daily. But I'm kicking myself in the ass to find one direction, focus and get it done. The challenge is always to find one a design direction and stick to it. I can do this with my clients but always find it hard to do when designing for myself. In terms of development I'd like to leverage some HTML5, CSS3 and possibly use a Responsive Web Design approach. I am also moving all of my content to a Wordpress enabled site which means that I will create my own custom theme for it. Now to get to sketching to define the look - I have so many ideas in mind. I just have to remember that this will be my design for now, it can/may change in the future but design for my taste and style now.

I hope to continue work with some of my clients in the new year and also gain a few more. Along the way I'll continue to learn and showcase my work.

Best wishes for a productive and prosperous new year!

Ivonne

Be True to Yourself

The one drawback about being a creative person is you have ideas running through your brain constantly and at warp speed. Actually, let me correct myself, that's not a drawback that's what makes creating fun! But the drawback is in trying to sort through all those ideas. I am constantly looking for inspiration and because my work is mainly digital I spend an awful lot of time on my iMac. So I surf the web. Constantly. Twitter, especially, makes it easy for me to follow people who inspire me and I see and am introduced to more and more things every day that inspire me. And as most creatives are, I am an avid note taker. I make notes, I bookmark links, I draw sketches, I buy books... anything and everything to try to jot down my thoughts for later reference. This is great but I'm constantly inundated with stimuli. The difficult task is to sift through everything and find something that truly means something to me and is inspirational in a way that allows me to be true to myself.

I admire a lot of designers in the web industry, in illustration, in graphic design, in fashion design, in art... there's so many! And I'm guilty of looking on in awe and failing to refine my style. I'm still trying to find it. I don't even know how to define my illustration style... accurate is the only word that comes to mind and that's such a boring description of something that should be so free and creative. I'm so OCD about my art that I stress over inaccurate details, which can be a good thing but also a hindrance to developing personal style. If art school taught me anything it was to make work that is you, there is no perfect in art, there is only true genuine reflection of you and what you perceive.

I guess more important than developing my personal style in my work is to be true to me. To be instinctual enough to make decisions based on what I like and what works for me - or, of course, my clients and their projects. Basically, what makes sense to the project at hand. There's always going to be designs and illustrations that you look at with envy because you admire them so much, but they may not be appropriate for the work you are producing and more importantly, they're not you.

It's also about being confident in your work to know when to stop. Art school also taught me that. You can constantly rework things, redesign things, redraw things, but the best artists are those who know when to stop. Take the abstract expressionists for example. To us looking on it seems that they haphazardly placed colours on the canvas until they got tired. But they made elaborate decisions on which would be the last brushstroke.

In my current efforts to redesign my website I am currently at the third iteration of my redesign. And yes, of course, experimentation is a part of design, but I can't keep changing my mind every time I think I've finally come to a decision. I need to stop looking at other people's websites and do what is true to me and when that happens I'll know to stop. I need to try to listen to my instincts and not try to emulate something I admire but let my ideas flow. I'm sure my struggle isn't a unique one. It's a constant struggle for creatives. And maybe the equivalent of a writer's block for artists is not just a lack of ideas and inspirations but also too many ideas clouding your own. The only thing I can think to do now is to stop looking at my favourite designs, stop looking at other websites, stop following links on twitter. Return to the sketchbook, clear my mind and try to hear my voice amidst the chaos.

I suspect that the process of sifting through one's ideas and finding one's voice doesn't end. It's there with every thing you create... in fact, it constantly happens through life. So I'll also try not to be so hard on myself and just let things go... Besides as artists and designers we hope to always do better and better work so the process is constant.

Luminarium Illustrations

This post is long overdue but after a few months I finally got my copy of Luminarium! This year I had the fortune of working again with Alex Shakar. I met Alex through my friends at EFS. Early this year he contacted me to develop his website just in time for the launch of his new novel, Luminarium, in August. The website turned out well and Alex has been blogging while on his book tour to keep us all up-to-date on his happenings.

What I may have briefly mentioned is that I began working with Alex not on his website but on his recent novel Luminarium when it was in it's post-writing, near-publication days. Back in 2009, while in the studio at EFS he approached my desk and asked if I did any illustration work and if I would be interested in doing some illustrations for his novel. I was shocked that he thought to ask me (I'm sure DL/SG at EFS had something to do with it) and I was honoured and excited!

I didn't know much about Alex's work but he outlined the novel and the themes within and his vision for the illustrations which would mark each of the chapters in his book. He wanted simple illustrations that mimicked icons on a computer desktop. They were to be small and minimalistic but easily identifiable. They were to be straight up black and white or at the most with slight gradations of grey.

This first project with Alex was an eye-opener for me as it allowed me to really focus on an idea and simplify it in an illustration. As always, Alex was great to work with and I've fulfilled a (silly... or not so silly now) dream of seeing my name in print and my work published. It was the start of more things to come. Those same icon illustrations appear in the intro sequence to his website.

If you haven't read any of Alex's work, take a look at his website and his works in particular. His writing has received great critical acclaim and Luminarium has been named one of the best novels of 2011 by several publications and editors. I strongly suggest you read Luminarium! The story struck a chord with me and it explores some interesting philosophical and spiritual ideas without losing its heart.

Congratulations to Alex Shakar and best wishes!

Photoshop Eyedropper Trick

I was reading up on some blogs and came across this Photoshop Eyedropper tool trick via The Design Cubicle. From @jessebc: "Just learned a new Photoshop trick. You can click and drag the eyedropper off the document and select any colour on the screen."

Where has the time gone?

When I look back at the last couple of years a lot has happened, and I mean A LOT! And the last few months have been eventful but the wheels are starting to slow and the dust is settling. In terms of my professional life though, well, I'm happy to say that it has been steady, consistent and now is kicking into high gear!

Mission US

I've been working on Mission 2 of Mission US with the guys at EFS for over the last year and I am extremely excited. This mission is so involved and so rich in content! I think kids are really going to enjoy it. The preliminary reviews have been great and the teachers and students are anxious for it to come out. We finish production in January 2012 so it's crunch time!

Weddings!

This past year a few of my closest friends and my sister got married. The festivities were wonderful! As most designers know, it is almost a given that one or some or most of your friends will at some point or another ask you to design something. For wedding invitations, this is almost always the case. Of course we don't do this for everyone but when it comes to our nearest and dearest I consider it an honour.

So first there was my sister. Her and her husband were together for over 11 years before they got married. They're both finance professionals who met at work and over the course of a decade fell in love :) My sister and I are very close and so I came to know their relationship well and learned about their style fairly quickly. They're both smart, funny, kind and intimately warm people. Their style has developed through years of corporate travelling and business shmoozing, which means they love an exclusive restaurant with delicate, expensive wines and they have great taste when it comes to everything they buy. While I lived in New York I was lucky to be rooming with them because it allowed me to live in a West Village penthouse and a Lower East Side apartment with granite countertops. If it wasn't for them I'd still be up in Harlem in my shoebox of a room with a wall built by a drunk mexican and which I rented for what some people pay for a mortgage in the suburbs.

Anyway... I knew when I designed their invitations that it had to reflect their taste but still be classic and simple. So I went about designing and thought first of a logo or monogram for the couple. It would be the unifying element for the printed items. I was pleased that the design of their logo developed quickly and easily. My sister was very particular about what she wanted the wedding to be like so she tweaked the design in her own ways and I obliged. In the end, I think I came up with a design that reflected them both well.

When I designed the logo, I wanted to communicate their years of travel or at least their travelling lifestyle and since Toronto was their home, New York was where he proposed and Singapore is where they would start their married life, it was the perfect trio to include. I also looked to wine labels and liquor labels for inspiration. And when my sister told me she wanted letterpress invitations I was thrilled because everything looks so chic in letterpress, in my opinion. In addition, their venue was St. George's Golf & Country Club in Etobicoke, which has beautiful surroundings and interior details - think mahogany staircases. The interior exudes a certain old worldly charm so I wanted to give the invites the same traditional look that would reflect the reception.

The final design was printed on an ivory card stock with a deep purple ink for the lettering. The monogram was pressed on with the same colour ink as the paper to have a reverse emboss effect. I opted to position the monogram a bit off tilt so as to feel like it was stamped individually by hand. They loved the way it turned out and I'm very happy with the result. What was even better was that the printer could print the invites on just one plate because none of the areas overlapped so they could run the invites once for the text with the purple ink and a second time for the monogram with ivory ink.

The invite and matching RSVP card was printed in letterpress, but the map was printed on a thinner card stock on a home printer. Because the church and the venue was quite a distance away (about an hour drive) and a lot of guests were expected from out of town, I drew the map myself to highlight only the important roads and have space to provide directions.

Overall, I think the invitations look great and I was honoured that the couple loved it. I think it set the tone for the wedding and the reception dinner.