On the walls

Over on Decor8 blog there is a little tour of my studio. I thought I should quickly share a few links to some of the cool things in the space. My pink office chair is a story from 2010 which you can read about here.

1. Click of Art, Limited Edition Pillow £39UK
2. Gemma Correll, Ampersand (no longer available)
3. Sucklord, Gay Empire Toy $50US
4. Devon Smith, Weep for the Pigeons $10US
5. Buff Monster's Destroyer Toy $115US
6. Watch Print, Dear Colleen $19US

Finally tea towels including Hey Girl all from my shop, Dear Colleen

Comical

Am I the only one that isn’t finding the Comic Sans joke all that funny anymore?  See example below (ok that is kind of funny, bad choice).

I don’t mean to rain on the Graphic designer parade. I know a lot of people have been enjoying a giggle at it’s expense for the past four, five years but I wonder if we (designery folks) have really thought through how it makes us look to non ‘designer’ types. You know our clients, the people who pay us. I kind of get the feeling it’s making us look a bit snobbish and unapproachable. 

I know it’s become a common theme for graphic designers to bond over, almost like a Mason handshake. I also know I’m in line to get a lot of flack for writing this piece but I can't help it I’m just over it. I follow a lot of smart talented graphic designs in all forms of social media and I witness the joke in one form or another at least once a day. Tell me any joke once a day for four years and at some point I’ll stop laughing and start pulling my hair out. 

Ok and here’s were the post gets real dangerous... (Hastily looks up tickets to Hawaii) I’m not all that offended by Comic Sans. Ok it’s not very fashionable at the moment but a lot of fonts I hated at art school ten years ago have since come back in trend. Fashion is cyclical and it’s perfectly possible some great young designer with more vision than me will take on this font and do something great with it, something that we’ll all want to emulate and bam suddenly we’re eating our roundly san serif words.

Snap shot

It's been a long time coming but I finally have my new line released and a shiny new shop to showcase them in. Inspired by watching far too many trashy shows about tattooing and many happy hours reading vintage typography books, the new designs have a different look but still, hopefully, very much feel like 'Dear Colleen' pieces.

Mostly today I wanted to share a couple of behind the scene pictures from the photo shoot I did just over a week ago. I'm very lucky that my studio is next door to a talented young photographer Emily Hlavac Green. My boyfriend has already been working with her and I've been very impressed with the images they have created together. As always working on a shoe string budget meant I had to call in a number of favours. The biggest being the kind and pretty folks who agreed to model for me. A big thank you to Gillian, Luci and DJ. Not only did they look fantastic they were all lovely and great fun to have on set. What should have been stressful actually ended up being a right laugh. 

I had this notion that I wanted to use balloons in the shoot, which I think has worked really well. The idea being that they would firstly be a subtle why of reflecting my speech bubble logo and secondly because I wanted to add graphics in a more organic why, making the text a prop in the photos.

I would highly recommend working with a professional photographer the results are so far beyond anything I could have achieved on my own. Thank you Emily.

One final note to thank my boyfriend Scott who has been beyond amazing through out this difficult process. A very talented designer in his own right with a sharp eye for detail. He's not let me settle for first goes or oks. It's not always easy to hear but I'm grateful for honest thought out feedback on tap. I'm also grateful for his endless surport, encouragement and love.