News Time Children.....

Anyone who played (or watched their fiancee endlessly play) Fallout 3 will get the title. Those of you who don't, it's not that I don't love you, but put down the book and pick up a controller every now and again ;)

Many apologies for not updating here on a more regular basis. The last week or two have been a bit busier than usual, and while I do realize I haven't every Monday, I just find too many smaller projects on the go that make me say "I'll get back to it shortly", yet sadly don't.

As for those projects, I'll discuss them now in the order they pop into my head:

The wedding planning is a juggernaut of a train that has now clearly left the station. It still has a ways to go, but it picks up speed at every junction. More things get added on, some get dropped, but in the end, it will be well worth it. I'm still working on designing the invitations (and anything else that needs designing), but we're waiting on information from an officiant first. I'll very much be posting about these things in the future.

Christmas also crept up on us pretty quick these last few weeks. Shopping, organizing, making plans and lists, checking them twice, you know how it is. A few pieces have been requested as gifts, which I'm working on.

Oh, an aside for that. I do a number of custom cards for various events, Christmas, birthdays, non-occasions, the like, and if anyone would like some sort of specialized and personalized card for their loved ones, by all means ask! The worst that will happen is that I don't have time and you'll have to buy the card you were going to anyway :P

I've picked up a few new clients as well, and have been doing some off and on work for some existing clients. A shout out to James at White Rock Technology Inc. Dude's awesome. I'll create a post for his work soon. A continued shout out to AJ Auto Repairs too! I hear business is doing well :)

I've hit at least one networking event a week over the last few weeks, which have been awesome, and the open house at Ontario Office Works on Friday was a blast. Pictures should be on Facebook.

That's all for now, if anything comes up, you'll be the first to know ;) Thanks as always for reading!

Sneak Peek!

Aside from the wedding materials, here's a sneak peek of the next project I'm working on. I'm excited... are you?

Thanks for reading ;)

Help The Children, Help The World

Today's project was actually brought to me by Carla. She works as a CDA (Communicative Disorders Assistant) on her way to becoming an SLP (Speech Language Pathologist) and it came to her attention that for some of her kids' speech issues, there aren't a lot of materials to help them elicit the proper sounds.

With that in mind, I present the following: do your kids have issues with eliciting the "th" sound, as in "gather" or "north"? Have they ever seen the Super Hero Squad cartoon? Do they love comics? Then the following is for you!

Thanks for reading!

This Was A Triumph!

Carla, who often works as my inspiration for a lot of projects, wanted to enter the ThinkGeek product shot contest, where you take a picture showing you using one of the products they sell online, and you can win a gift certificate to the site.

Well, these are generally posted on their site anonymously, but because WE WON I thought I'd share. While I technically own every item you see in the picture, I do not own anything owned by Valve :P

Thanks for reading!

Project - Engagement Puzzle

So back in high school, my fiancee became friends with a wonderful young woman named Hitomi who was an exchange student from Japan. She's a lot of the reason we went over for a visit a few years back, and when Carla and I announced our engagement, Hitomi was awesome and made us a personalized Japanese Kit Kat box designed with all kinds of images from our engagement and Facebook.

A little while ago, Hitomi announced her engagement to Zac, a mutual friend of ours who was also in Japan, and we immediately started thinking about what we could do for them. Always wanting to push for a new project, we eventually came to the puzzle idea and I set forth!

This sort of project is always interesting because it really flexes the networking muscles: I had to source out a new printer to create the actual puzzle (most places couldn't print to such a thick stock), I had to contact Zac's dad to source high quality images of their engagement, and I had to put the whole thing together on a tight timeline.

In the end, I'm extremely happy with the results, as were the happy couple. Thanks for reading!

Project - Rustic Wedding Card

So I believe in my last post I commented that I was working on a few little projects that I couldn't necessarily name because the final recipients of the designs read this blog.

Well the dates have passed, the projects are finished and in hands, so I no longer need to protect the innocent! With that I bring you - HOLLYWOOD WEDDING REDEUX!!

*explosion* *screeching tires* *Wilhelm scream*

*cough*

So my sister commissioned me for some decorations for a wedding party a few months ago and the wedding was on the 13th. From what I hear it went beautifully. After the fact, she also wanted to give the bride and groom a special congratulatory card that spoke to the down-to-earth, rustic theme of the wedding, and asked me to step in and produce something.

This was around the time that I was experimenting with moving cards, and I had two ideas right off the bat for this card: a pop up birdcage and a scrap booking look to the outside. My sister agreed on both, and I set to it. Amazingly, Canon paper offers a neat template for creating a pop up birdcage, and it was the cleanest one I was able to find online. (I modified mine a little because it was A LOT of small pieces needing to be glued together)

From there I worked a sort of found object look to the front, including dollar store jewellery for some wedding bands, and the rest is history:

As always, thanks for reading!

One For The Road

Good morning gentle readers.

I just wanted to drop a line to say that the Intelligent Designs blog is still up and running. September was a little slow for business, but picked up in terms of side/personal projects that keep me busy but don't necessarily make money :P

Many of these projects are actually almost over as well, and I will be creating posts surrounding them. I can't really go into the details of these posts at the moment because some of them are gifts or surprises for people who may or may not read this blog, so yea...

Moving on...

September was good for networking and building business contacts. Hopefully October picks up but if it doesn't, I'm going to put some thought into more of my personal projects (that are for nobody but me) and see if they can make some money.

I'll probably blog about that later. Until then, thanks as always for reading!