I love doodling my initials, and coming up with new custom lettering. I have been feeling particulary inspired by Doyald Young lately!

So far, I have decided on the projects I’m going to put in my portfolio, and none of them are good enough yet. The best piece of advice I have received so far in my portfolio journey is that if a piece is not good enough for you, don’t just do the lazy thing and put it in anyway, push yourself until it is up to your standards, because it’s your book and essentially it’s your ass on the line.

I have my layouts almost done, which is a big step, but great layouts without any work to go in them is not going to do me any good. I suppose I will quit procrastinating and try to get some work done tonight. My schedule is one project a week for the next nine weeks. Wish me luck!

This year, I’m going to choose books alphabetically by author’s last name. I don’t care when they were written, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, but they all must be for pleasure (no work related books or design books).

So far I have read, A: The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

I just started Beautiful Children by Charles Bock (bonus points for the first letter of the title also starting with a “B”).

I’m always open to suggestions for the remainder of the alphabet, so please post a comment if you have a must read. Note: I’m looking for things that aren’t necessarily on Bestsellers lists.

There was something she said at the end that really struck me, as it did the rest of the audience. She came up with this list when asked to judge the work of others and decided that these are the things she uses to judge her own work by:

1. Does it bring JOY?
2. Is there a sense of WONDER?
3. Does it invoke CURIOSITY?
4. Could it INSPIRE?
5. Is it UNUSUAL?

Bonus points for being FUNNY!

*Note: Bantjes does not try to hit all five of these every time, but she said she must meet one or two, or else she throws it out the window and tries again with a new idea.

This made me decide that I need to come up with my own list of criteria to judge my work by. Bantjes’ list is fantastic, but I think if I sat down and honestly wrote out how I judge work, then I would have a different list than hers. I suppose I should do this in the next couple of weeks, so when it comes time to really crack down on my portfolio I will have more focus.

I modified this snowman garland from Design*Sponge to make snowman Christmas lights.

Snowman Lights

And here is my finished no glue ring garland, which turned out fantastic. See the instructions here.

Paper Ring Garland

I also have gone a little crazy with snowflakes with my gift wrap. On this big box from amazon, I chose to forgo the wrapping paper altogether and glue snowflakes on instead, and on the smaller box I used a snowflake as a gift tag. Visit here for snowflake instructions.

Snowflake Gift Wrap

Contrast. This is what makes a reader (or user) look twice, and if often the most important principle to adhere to. The biggest problem with many designs is the lack of contrast. If two things are supposed to look different, then go for it and make them look different, because if there is only a minor difference between the two it just looks like a mistake. With contrast it’s better to go too far, and then pare down later than to be a wimp and have to go big later. Go big or go home.

Repetition. Repetition is another important design principle, but is too often abused. Repetition creates consistency, but should not be overdone. It is good to repeat a certain element throughout say, a book, but maybe this element let’s say, a stylized chapter name, appears only on the intro page to the chapter. It would be overdone to repeat this on every single page. Use repetition, but with great restraint. Repetition should be used to unify a design, for example, use the same logo and typeface on all pieces of stationary design, but there is no need to show the same logo multiple times on each piece.

Alignment. The lack of alignment is a sure sign of an amateur designer. Experienced designers know that there is no randomly placing items on a page, everything is in it’s place for a reason and it aligns with something else on the page. The use of grid systems on layouts ensures proper alignment, on the final product, invisible lines form where the gridlines once were. This brings a cohesiveness to the layout.

Proximity. This basically means to group related items together. It’s an organization system for information. When you go to the grocery store all of the pasta is in one aisle, and pasta sauce is placed near the pasta. The cereal has it’s own aisle also. It wouldn’t make sense for spaghetti to be in aisle one, bowties to be in aisle three and elbow pasta to be in aisle ten. The same goes for design, categorize the information in a way that will make sense to the user (or reader) and physically separate the different categories.

Use these four principles in each layout and website to create strong and lasting designs that are visually appealing and understandable.

In the next few days I will be posting good and bad examples of each of the four elements.

I still can’t believe these are free. I don’t see myself getting any work done today because I will be playing with my new toy: Aviary.

Some days I just can’t stand working on my computer, and I have to make something by hand. Yesterday was one of those days, and I ended up make this image. I used old catalogs, brochures and good old scissors & glue (two of my favorite tools for collage).