lettering, stamping, branding, and oh my!

What? I have a blog? Oh, right.
Last few weeks have been completely insane with non-business-related things (local bff moving away forever, trips to surrounding "i" states, friends visiting, condo on the brain) but I'm trying to get myself back to work so I can have my rebranding done and my Off the Wall Greetings shop up and gorgeous by June.

You know that lovely banner Bean Sprout Studios designed for me? In the interest of branding and consistency and all that fun marketing crap that just makes "it looks and feels better" sound like deep psychological manipulation, I asked her what font she used. Turns out to be "Lettering Delights Letterpress" from scrapgirls.com. For $3, I decided it was worth paying, even though I normally stick to the free fonts from DaFont.com. I've been through DaFont over and over again and for $3 I can Lettering Delights Letterpress my brains out on everything and be done with it.

Thing already in the works with my new name and font: a stamp from Stacey of AsspocketProductions that says offthewallgreetings.etsy.com so I can stamp the insides of all my envelopes and the outsides of all my packages and your forehead. I really like her work and she's a fellow Illinoisian. I'm buying one of her fabulous custom Chicago Skyline address stamps, too, so I can stamp my new permanent condo address like a cool person all over everything. Way better than address labels, since I never know how many labels I'll use and at some point you either move with tons left over or you have to keep reordering them or using the weird ones from awkward charities like the Foreskin Foundation*. Stacey also has a whole fantastic shop of naughty stamps appropriately named Stampin Naughty, but I know I'd just get myself into trouble with those.




*I made that up.

more awesome

BeanSproutStudio Amy is awesome. Awesome awesome awesome. I still have to pick my color scheme if it's going to be branding my universe. I like the orang a lot, but maybe something other than the light blue? I usually gravitate towards red and purple, but I'm flexible, especially since I'm really liking these colors but I might get sick of them together long-term.

Perhaps I'll spend a few hours on COLOURlovers.com. It's one of my favorite time sucks already. You can create/discover your own, rate, and comment on other people's colors, then use those colors to create palettes and use palettes to create patterns. Basically, it's a celebration of color and color in contrast with other color and using those colors as design elements.

From their about page:

COLOURlovers™ is a resource that monitors and influences color trends. COLOURlovers gives the people who use color - whether for ad campaigns, product design, or even in architectural specification - a place to check out a world of color, compare color palettes, submit news and comments, and read color related articles and interviews.

You get the idea. Anyway, I'll probably be using it already to choose paint colors for the condo I bought today, so why not?

In Love

This morning, I woke up to a convo from Amy (not the one I generally talk about, but apparently people named Amy are all awesome) of BeanSproutStudio that included two banners she'd put together having read my whining and freaking out. When I saw the first one, I couldn't believe it. It's the banner that I've been dreaming of from the start. The damask background, the font that looks stamped but is nice and blocky and legible but still askew and "off the wall"-ish...

I think more color would be good, but considering this was charity banner from a person who doesn't know me in real life, I think I have to marry her and have ten thousand of her babies and make her my new best friend. Because seriously, that is so close to what was in my mind but I couldn't do. You should go buy birth announcements and pretty-not-snarky cards from her. Lots of them.