A few new designs up at Minted.com.

Last semester in my Design Business Link class, we were paired with a local nonprofit organization to help them with their design and marketing needs. I was on a team that got to work with People's Community Health Center, which serves the un- and under-insured in Baltimore. We were asked to help brand and advertise their new dental office, and one of our recommendations was to do graphic wall decals in the clinic to tie in the brand and brighten up the place. I am pleased/relieved! to say those decals are now up and ready for the grand opening on Saturday (thanks to the help of my long-suffering spouse).



Campaign posters coming soon to a bus shelter near you (assuming you are someone who lives in our around the Anne Arundel area).

I also hope to have some minty fresh news to announce soon.

I actually had some free time this weekend, and instead of updating my blog (hey, it's only been six months since my last post), I designed a few business card for Minted.com's Stay in Touch Business Card Challenge. Here are the finished products:








You can even vote for them if you feel so inclined but don't feel like you have to. Oh! And they have really cute stuff you can buy like this and this and this and this...

Just a few pics of the letterpress invites I designed for my Mum's 60th birthday party. I also designed a custom return address stamp.

I've been designing invitations for a party my sister and I are throwing my mom to celebrate a milestone birthday. A perfect excuse for letterpress, right? I'm also trying to finagle a field trip to Typecast Press to see my invites come off the press. If I do, I promise to post pictures. In the meantime, I'm loving all the great letterpress stuff out there, and here are a few of my favorites.





from Lemon and Lavender, Orange Beautiful, Bella Figure, JP Gary & Kiera Ormut-Fleishman, Sycamore Street Press, Jessica Hische, Gilah Press + Design, Ty Mattson, and Hello Tenfold.

I'm taking an ActionScript class this semester, and I'm surprised by how much I'm learning and (shock!) enjoying it. For our final project, we are going to be developing a Flash game, but in the meantime we've been working on these cat video games:


Nervous


Enclosed

OK, so they aren't really cat video games, but Pumpkin Escobar seems to like them...

It's time for my semi-annual blog posting! In my last post, I mentioned this poster series for my Advanced Graphic Design class. The assignment was to design posters for three films by one director. The director I chose was Billy Wilder, and I focused on three of his films noir, Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, and Sunset Boulevard. I also designed the condensed modern typeface I used for the film titles (I call it Bill Noir), and I am pretty pleased with the final product (definitely click on the image for more detail).

Anyway, no promises, but if this snow keeps up, I might post again before July.

In my advanced graphic design class we are going to be designing a poster series advertising a hypothetical AFI event celebrating the work of a director featuring three of his films. The director I've chosen is Billy Wilder. A contemporary of auteurs like Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder is much more understated and in my opinion underrated. Not only was he one of the preeminent directors of the film noir era but also continued to consistently produce great films for over 50 years. The three movies I am focusing on are Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, and Sunset Boulevard. In addition to the poster we are going to be designing a typeface (YAY!) to reflect the style of the director and/or films. So I have been researching handdrawn titles from the 1940s. Some inspiration.

Félicitations, Adrian Frutiger!

Holy moly! Two month with no updates. I thought I would post some of the work that's been keeping me so busy during the weeks and weeks I've been away.



For my Design Principles and Strategies class we had to design a brand identity for a fictional English tea shop in the trendy Fells Point neighborhood. I choose the name Grey (a play on London weather and English tea varieties). We also had to use our logo to design a number of items including tea packaging (from left to right: Classic Grey, Double Bergamot, and Green Citrus).

In my Design Principles and Strategies class, I've been doing a lot of abstract compositions to demonstrate, well, design principles and strategies--not much that I would want to share. But I thought I would go ahead and post this week's assignment, which was to make patterns demonstrating the concepts of repetition, similarity, and anomaly because patterns are purdy.





Just one more week of abstract concepts (YAY!), and then we'll be doing some book covers, a series/set of three. I think I am going to do a series of Modern American Classics, including Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, American Pastoral by Philip Roth, and White Noise by Don DeLillo. Gotta get reading...

Some really beautiful stop motion work by Oren Lavie and a sweet song to boot...

I've been working on a little speculative project and have been fiddling with some cover ideas, and I was wondering which cover you all think looks best. It's a graphic novel set in the 40s in the classic crime/mystery genre. Any and all comments are welcome. There is a poll on the side there if you want your vote to be counted.

(a)
(b)

I saw this technique used on a poster about a year ago. Just this week I saw it used on a Threadless T and the new Animal Collective record, Merriweather. Pretty neat, huh?

Just six [tiny] days away from the start of the Spring semester, and I am still finishing up my over-the-break projects. But as of right now, the web site kristinroyer.com is indeed done.

In addition to working on my website, I've also been designing my business card, so I thought I would post the (almost definitely) final design.

So I am {finally} working on my website again and going through my work to-date and came across a couple of Christmas-themed projects that have never seen the light of day. I am fond of both of them. So I thought I'd post them here. The first is a Christmas card I designed last year, but didn't get them done in time to have them letterpressed. Have I mentioned I like type? Because I really like type, especially when it's punny.


I was also working on a design for a Christmas CD a few months back, but things fell apart, and the client was interested in going in a different direction. Humbug! Oh well, Merry Christmas.

As 2008 comes to a close people all over the tubes are publishing best of lists. One of my personal favorites is Pitchfork's best of the Worst Album Covers of 2008 which includes this gem from Brad Paisley. Really, Brad, you thought this looked good? It must have been a pretty good year for album art. There are some on this year's list that aren't so terrible. The Deathcab cover could have been worser...

There's a great design challenge this week over at Typophile. I am posting my submission because I like to not post anything for a really long time and then post a lot in two days (Have you noticed?). My design is a bit morbid, but that was the luck of the draw. The rules of the challenge are:

1. Create a book cover, using a fictitious title and an image from the LIFE photo archive.

2. To get your title, click on the Wikipedia Random Articles page and whatever topic you get is the title.

3. Head over to the LIFE photo archive and enter the title (or part of the title) as your search term. Use any image from the search result for your book.

Hopefully, I can stay on top of Type Battles and post one each week at least while I'm on break.

School is nearly done, and I am really excited to start working on some side projects over the break... In preparation I was looking for a little inspiration and stumbled upon the photographs of Thomas Allen. He creates 3-D dioramas from pulp paperbacks. They're amazing.