The kids and I spent some time the other day practicing our painting / mess-making skills (but that comes naturally, right?). What a photo opportunity! And when I loaded this on the computer I immediately had an idea for a little design. My kids tend to have that effect

I thought this would also make an excellent Facebook Cover so I rearranged a little and created this panoramic. I’m glad Facebook integrated this feature into the user profiles. It allows for a little more self expression (or promotion) space and I do really enjoy panoramic designs.

Working lately on my new website designs. It’s been fun – the colors, fonts, images … everything is making me happy (so it makes sense I chose the name I did) and it should, right? The more I work on it, the more real it’s becoming. My goal is to have these sites go live by the end of the month as well as have business cards and some postcards ordered (and a few other things for my face painting venture like a vinyl banner – can’t wait for that).

I started with a quick hand-drawn sketch of BeeHappyDesigns.com which isn’t really even clean enough to post here but it worked for my brainstorming purposes. Made a few minor changes from that to this digitized version as I researched the functionality of what I want to do. I am using Illustrator for these mock-ups and I really like the clean, bright look that software and vector images offer. The plan is to make these sites responsive so they can be viewed on multiple different devices – something I am not as experienced with in web coding but I will learn. I’m keeping the same basic structure for BeeHappyFaces.com but changing up the colors a bit and I want to have a grid of rotating pictures (in place of a carousel) with different images of my work and also text slides of the different things I can paint or venues I have worked. I’m debating keeping to just one blog between the two sites for simplicity’s sake. My first plans were to develop these two businesses separately but the more I do, the more I am realizing they can be more of a c0-brand of each other. They are both creative art services so, why not? And, I want all my design clients to know I face paint and all my face paint clients to know I design… I can get cross business! Now to pull these into Dreamweaver to fine tune…

The original brief for this design called for a “Louis Vuitton” style which inspired the first three logo designs. I personally love all three and they were well received but it was decided they were too busy for what this brand was going for. I “went back to the drawing board” so to speak, and came up with a much more simplified look with the candy icon and company name (mimicking another style the client had seen and liked). A few font and color choices presented, and the last image was the final result. I do like it – sweet and simple. Two colors which will translate easily into black and white or spot color printing.

I found an interesting tutorial and was inspired to try it on my own as a basis for a page in the kids’ baby books. I did this one for Caleb’s book and I am brainstorming what to do for Cece’s. My process was a bit different from the tutorial (as I tend to do) as I wanted the text to be editable and not mess with making all those unneeded brushes. I left the text layers as vector and grouped them. I then set the face image to a clipping mask and applied the invert mask over that layer. Anyways, enough technical talk – here’s the image. It will be for a 12×12 book. Really excited to print this one up!

I love the result.

I’ve been working on designing sets of Wedding Invitations and Stationary as part of my new product line for Bee Happy Graphics. So, as I browsed through my stock art I came upon this wicked tribal looking heart and I had to start playing with it right away (yes, I’m like a kid when it comes to designing stuff) Here’s what I did:

How would you like that on your arm?  Well anyways I’m still working on the reverse side but I started thinking I should make a little companion graphic to use and so I made this:

Isn’t it sweet? A little cliche, yes. BUT it was fun to make. And I learned a few new techniques: adding a grain effect, creating a banner, and creating a rose (Link Here) which, incidentally also showed me how to use the polarize tool AND the tweak distortion so, yay!

I could definitely see this being printed up as temporary tattoos to be handed out to guests – how cool would that be?! Eh? (Husband is nodding yes to me but his eyes are telling me no)

Clean, classy, yet modern logo with a bit of embellishment and color for a business investor. The spiral represents a new idea or “venture” becoming reality – through both color and shape. I also created different color variations in both the main logo and accents to allow for different graphic treatments and printing restrictions (for spot colors or one color). As a designer experienced in pre-press production, I always appreciate a versatile logo.

Since I’m now on a new computer with new software, it’s time for a new logo. I’m deciding to fully re-brand myself as I venture into doing more freelance work. Here is a preview of the new logo and look I’ve been working on. Tell me below – what do you think?

Bright, fun colors and flowers are on order for this little one’s first birthday party invitation! I love how it turned out and my family and I are looking forward to attending the party…

In other news, I’m now using CS 5.5 and looking forward to downloading my copy of CS6 next week!

Website design for Atticare Insulation, LLC. The goal was to highlight the services they provide while keeping the layout and graphics clean and the navigation simple. More of an online brochure with a few links to resources and a company contact form. I was also asked to replicate a few of the graphics in high resolution to be used in their print materials.