Get a Move On!

I love the idea of those little postcards that announce that you've moved and inform people of your new address... I've just never had my stuff together enough to actually send something out.

So when one of my friends was looking up potential moving-card designs, I was like, "Psh, I can do that!" I'm so glad to have a friend who let's me design random things for her.

And here's the back of the postcard. Names and the address of their new house have been changed of course :)

I also made this alternate front:

She plans to print them through Zazzle, similar to how we did our Save the Dates back in the day. I really can't wait to see how they turn out and, of course, I'm thrilled to have another friend in the home owner's club! Congrats my friend!

I don't like to use labels but...

Kevin recently entered a home-brew competition sponsored by one of our great local breweries 3 Stars. I felt very strongly, as the self-appointed Chief Marketing Officer of Battery Brewing, that our entries needed some sweet labels.

Sadly the guys did not win, but I'm sure we got special bonus points for style (maybe?). Here is Kevin at the brewery turning in his Chai Tea Wheat Ale called, "Special Tea."

The other beer, headed up by Ed, was "Coco Pow" which was a Coconut Curry Brown Ale. 

I made both labels in Photoshop with some doodles that Kevin and I quickly whipped up. 

We took them to FedEx/Kinkos for laser printing (helps keep the ink from running if the bottle gets condensation on it) and Kevin used rubber cement to glue them on on our way to the brewery for drop off. Several people walked by as he was doing this and gave us very suspicious looks…

Ok, here's one more artsy glamour shot of the bottles. 

Battery Brewing T-Shirt Designs

There's nothing more fun than showing up with a large group of people to an event all sporting the same shirt ammiright?! This will be our fourth year taking on the Dogfish Dash, held in Milton, Delaware at the Dogfish Head Brewery. We've done shirts before, but since the size of our team has grown, we decided to upgrade!

I've done a lot of work over the past few years to tweak the logo that Kevin originally designed for his home brew label, Battery Brewing. For his birthday this past year, I slapped that logo on alllll sorts of things. So it was an obvious choice for the front of the shirt.

Last year, while drinking in the taproom at Dogfish the day before the race, Kevin declared that he loved running, beer and EVERYONE HEEEEERE! This quickly became our rallying cry, and also maybe a song with jazz hands. So we decided to go with that on the back.

Just for fun, here are some other layouts that I played with while designing the shirts.

We ended up ordering them from Custom Ink which I can't recommend highly enough. The customer service staff were literally in my Top 3 of customer service experiences EVER. So friendly, so helpful, so easy. Love them. 

So yeah, I'll update this when we get some nice group shots, but for now I'm pretty much over-the-moon happy to see almost 20 people wearing my design ;o) To hold you over, here's a group shot of a few of us from 2012 in our old shirts.  

Adventures in Logo Design (AKA Gifts for Homebrewers)

I feel like at this point in my relationship with Kevin, I should be able to write a book on "Gifts for Homebrewers." This year, I decided to get creative and up the ante... customized Battery Brewing swag!

I started with some basics from Zazzle and Cafe' Press like stickers, magnets and a key chain. I designed a lovely poster with some choice pics of the Battery Brewing team in action. Finally I found some specialty shops to order a bartender's bottle opener and, the best part, a dozen custom pint glasses. Ooooh, ahhhhh.

Read more about the team, the logo and the birthday celebration here on the Battery Brewing blog.

You're Invited to DIY

The wedding DIY project that I'm most proud of was our invitations. It's not that I'm picky (yes I am), but I scoured all the usual websites and Etsy and couldn't find anything I really loved. Having someone else design them... so not in our budget. So I decided to design them myself.

Starting with the save the date, we took some beautiful photos that Kevin had taken of the barn where we held our reception and Photoshopped them into something really personal. The background is a repeatable burlap texture and we picked a free font.

When we started thinking about the invites I wanted them to look pretty similar to the save the date. I used the same background and font but just took a different photo from Kevin's collection. I made a simple gingham for the RSVP postcard. 

On the back of the invite, I used a blue-washed photo of us. I thought it was a fun surprise for the back and just made it that much more personal.

For the back of the RSVP, we really wanted to be snarky. Kevin also designed a block print fence which a scanned and added in.

I highly recommend DIY-ing invites if you have even a little Photoshop know-how. I'm definitely not an expert. We printed about 50 of each item for about $120 all told on Zazzle. Overall, I was really glad we went this route!

A Different Shade of Green

Took some time today to polish the first botanic print I made last week. I used Kuler to pull the actual colors from the photo so that it looks more natural and I really like the results! 

In other news, I finished my final two regular grad school classes last week so I'm onward to my capstone project. My client is the NOAA National Maritime Fisheries Service so expect some fabulous fishy prints coming soon!

Infographic: People LOVE Movies

Here's an infographic I made for a class presentation this week. The assignment was to do in-depth interviews for communications research on Netflix. I was dorkily excited to put my Photoshop skillz (the "z" makes it real) to good use. If I hadn't left it to the night before it was due, I probably would have polished it a bit more but I was really proud of the end result. 

Important to note is the little logo I did for our fake PR/Research agency, Lemon Communications. My team decided since I missed class while in Scotland that they'd nickname me Lemon (like Liz Lemon, har har). So when it was time to pick a group name, Lemon Communications was a clear choice. I said that was fine as long as I was the boss :o)

All joking aside, they were a really great group to work with and we pretty much knocked it out of the park. Go Team Lemon!