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!

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!

Project - Hollywood Bachelorette Party

Greetings gentle readers.

So for the past few newsreel style posts I've been hinting that I was working on a larger project for my sister. Well, over the weekend her sister-in-law and fiancee had their wedding shower, with the theme being "Hollywood Awesomeness".

Donna (my sister) collected up a number of themed items from places like Party Packagers, but commissioned me to go the extra mile and create some great personalized items for those involved. This resulted in the following:

This Hollywood sign hung up over the doors, while a second, larger one was staked into the ground

as you walked in from the driveway. Both we made using white foamcore boards.

This marquee was for the movie All You Need Is Love, staring the bride and groom.

Crafted again from foamcore and several coloured sheets of bristol board.

We created a Walk of Fame for all the members of the wedding party. The bride and groom's star were much larger

and at the end, and were trailed by each member of the wedding party. Donna laid out a red fabric "carpet" too.

I also created an actual movie poster for the event. Hold on, let me get a better image of it...

I couldn't make it to the shower itself, but apparently everything went off great. I got a lot of praise for my work, and apparently had a few of my business cards handed out too! I really love when I can put a number of different design pieces together like this, and when I get free reign to have fun :)

As always, thanks for reading!

Wear It With Pride

So I've been fairly busy with some overflow work from a designer friend of mine, cropping out images for a website that as soon are finished, I'll link over to. That, coupled with not being home most weekends and trying to get some design work for my sister (who is setting up a bachelorette party) for Saturday, have made me fairly busy, and without a lot of time to update.

However! I did start up a D&D campaign DM'd by Jim and in the course of said game, we voted the character "Spooks" (a fire breathing cat) VIP. In honour, I made this:

See the kitteh! See it?! Thanks for reading!