sneak peak

I'm going out tonight and I don't care what my conscience says about it. I have so much freelance work to do right now that I could work for the next 20 hours straight and possibly not be done.  My brain needs breaks.  This is exhausting.

The Punk Rock Mommy poster is a design I did for my friend Jon's photography show coming up in May.  The show highlights a photography project he did with our friend Andrea who had breast cancer and passed away in 2008. She was a straight up punker her whole life, but had 6 kids and was an amazing mother to them and many other people.  Jon was allowed to be at her side, snapping photos, from the first doctor's appointment all the way up to a couple days before she died.  She wrote a blog during this time- a total of a year and a half- called PunkRockMommy.org and got a ton of press for it. Thousands of people read it daily.  Check it out if you get a chance.  Now, years later, Jon is fulfilling her wish that the blog be turned into a book.  Jon, myself, and this guy Chris have been working on it since the beginning of the year and the gallery show is promo for the book coming out.  The book is going to be beautiful- mostly designed by Chris, but with a ton of influence and guidance by Jon. The man has a vision and I'm really enjoying being a part of it.

 These two Jazz Fest posters totally shouldn't be up here for others to see. They're not completed at all. I just did them over the past couple days and sent them off to the lady who needs them yesterday. Our next steps are for her to choose colors, give me more info to put on the bottom of the posters, and then we'll tweak the designs for the next few days until we send them out hopefully on Friday to the printer. I'm just excited about them.  I like making "music art". By the way, as I type, there are three men sitting on my roof doing shape-note singing. It's beautiful and inspirational. Abstractly, I don't know why humans make music but I'm sure glad we do.

...when you only have an hour...

As I get older, I'm getting worse at remembering to get people presents for fun occasions. It's terrible and I feel like a jerk. I should make a resolution to remind myself a month before each event/holiday. And I have less money, so I make more presents, which takes more time. So when I am forgetful and then I remember that I have to make someone a present in the next HOUR... these kinds of things occur.

This was make very quickly for my friend's kid's 1st birthday.  I didn't have time to scan it, so I took this low quality phone picture.

On the flip side of things, I'm making flyers for my job now. This one is just kind of cute. I'm trying to stretch the bounds at work to see how much time I really have to design and how much time I have to dedicate to admin work.  So I didn't spend too much time on this and it's not amazing, but it's a start to hopefully at beautifully hand-drawn aesthetic.

I also make things more along these lines:

I get immensely self-conscious about my design work. I'm an almost 100% self-taught designer. I don't know tricks to making type very interesting like "real" designers do. Every day I gather reference and inspiration to copy, twist, mimic, and learn from. My "inspiration and research" folder on my desktop has thousands of images in it from poster designs to website layouts to typographical tricks to email headers to everything else you could imagine. My mantra for years has been "ugh! i just need to get better at this!" as I spend hours and hours trying different layouts.

But then today I showed one of my co-workers a design I made for her and her jaw dropped and she told me that I make magic happen.  She is usually very generous in her compliments and doesn't know how to design herself, but it made me feel competent  in my work, which helps everyone once in a while, you know?

I'll get better at this.