Project - Zelda Activity Book

Good evening gentle readers!

I might have mentioned this before, but due to my profession (and general level of over the top creativity) I hardly ever see the need to BUY special event cards anymore. Combine that with making Carla a card every year, and you have this project :)

Carla's big into Nintendo, Zelda in particular. So big in fact, that her birthday present this year are tickets to the Zelda Symphony. That's right. Zelda. Symphony. So I figured hey, why not theme the birthday card to Zelda also!

But what to do exactly? I've been making more and more elaborate cards, pop-ups, pull tabs, all sorts of things, so I made a sideway motion and opted to keep the card simple, but the presentation elaborate. One day shortly after that decision, I was in Michael's and saw an activity book and the lightbulb went right off!

So I started working on the important pages, and pulled together a word search, crossword puzzle, and other fun creative pages, as well as some images for colouring, and the rest sort of fell into place.

I learned a few things with this one that I hadn't done before:

First, I spent a lot of time trying to create inexpensive stickers (the last picture above). I explored vinyl and printing labels, when I came across Xerox brand removable decals for windows. They run through my inkjet printer no problem, and when applied to a laminated page, peel, stick and reapply easily.

Secondly, the 2-up pages were larger than 8.5 x 11, which is the max size for my printer at home. I went EVERYWHERE trying to find a printer that would print to newsprint, and nobody would. My last attempt was a small place in Fonthill, and man were they amazing there. Printed the newsprint and didn't charge me an arm or a leg for the setup.

One of the first shout outs for this blog absolutely goes to  Pelham Printing and Promotions Ltd. Certainly my new favourite print house. Cheers!

Anyway, aside from obvious copyright issues, I'm happy to make copies of this, or send over the files ;) As always, thanks for reading!

Project - Gimme Your Best

Hello again, everyone! Today's post is for a project that ties heavily into connecting and social media, so I hope give all the credit to where it's due.

For the team of Gimme Your Best, collaboration is a powerful tool. It makes bright ideas brighter, and pie-in-the-sky ideas doable. Accomplishing these things while keeping a keen eye focused on building a solid community networking really spoke to me, so when Lisa McDonald, on behalf of her team, contacted me needed branding work for their upcoming project I was on board right away.

They're doing so much with social media, I can't even begin to tell it all to you. What I will do, before I pander off on to the design work I did for them, is direct readers to their Facebook page, their Twitter page, and a link to the site offering tickets to their upcoming networking event.

And now, for my small contributions :P

As always, thanks for reading!