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.

yikes

Apparently, my banner is a "design disaster." There's a number of people who agree. I threw it up in my JillHannah Etsy shop just to get some quick feedback, and "design disaster" is the consensus. Pisswrinkles. Part of that is the fact that, for whatever reason, the text is coming out all pixely. I don't know why and I don't know how to fix it. But I'm also getting comments about the colors not meshing and "design disaster" isn't something people are saying cruelly or lightly.

So what the hell should my banner and shop redesign look like? I don't have money to spend on professionals who will also take the time to really research my particular market and product and what will best connect the two. Hell, I don't even know if there are any real marketing-psychology trained designers out there. There should be. But for my little tiny business purposes, I just want something that gives the feel of both the wallpaper business card envelopes and the snarky cards. Like the name does. The name is perfect. I want a look to match.

Brainstorms, people!!!

Bannerama-ding-dong-YEAH!

Spend enough time obsessing over your rebranding as a distraction from the fact you feel like total and complete crap and eventually, you get somewhere.
I've worked very hard on this. When my head is being particularly bad for more than just a day, I like to have high-concentration high-creativity but very positive and productive-feeling and low-real-stress projects to keep me distracted. Crafting and Etsy businessy stuff in general is great for it. Kakuro and sudoku and crossword and any other puzzles are good, too, unless my brain starts doing its weird misfire thing and then I get frustrated, but at that point in the migraine I get frustrated by most tasks and if I can't stand watching movies I just sleep.

But I discovered the "torn paper" filter on Adobe Photoshop. After fake tearing down my scanned wallpaper (which I already messed with levels-wise to make it pop better) with the lasso tool, I discovered I had to actually apply the torn paper filter (found under "sketch") to a white background surrounding my wallpaper edge. Then I just futzed with it until I liked how it looked.

After a number of solid colors and patterns behind the wallpaper, I realized it should look like it was torn away from something. Distract brain from pain by going through different ideas and...sky! Yes, sky would be lovely. So I found a public domain image of the sky, messed with it (i.e. stretched out one particular corner that had the exact amount of clouds I wanted and played with the hue and saturation) until I was happy, and VOILA!

Then, the hardest part. Font. Back to dafont.com. Back through all the script fonts and the stencil fonts and some of the fonts I already have and just like. Try them all on my new background banner. Make sure they're not too long horizontally or too illegible or too pixely or too stupid. Something that feels right. My favorite visually is still too hard to read. It's called "Fountain Pen Frenzy" and it's got the exact look and feel I want, but I'm afraid if you didn't know what it said, you wouldn't be able to decipher it and that kind of defeats the purpose. Observe:So that's clearly a no-go. There were a few fonts that have the fabulous real pen-and-ink letter writing look, but it seems they generally have a harder time translating onto anything but a solid white background in their original size without looking weird.

I also really like the FELL font family in general and kind of like this version, too:Plus on this one I played with barely hiding the letters behind the wallpaper. Same goes for the version with the highest ranked font from the old version of the banner. I can't decide if I still like it, though...
SO! Redesignmania is nearing its end. I still need to get my photographer friend over here and actually make a final decision on font (real comment input is wonderfully helpful...I'll stop tormenting you with polls for now, though I may set up a quick final one and beg the EtsyGreetings Team for votes). And if you read this whole blog post, mazel tov. You are awesome. You totally deserve 20% off your first purchase from Off the Wall Greetings once it exists, or any purchase from JillHannah in the meantime, but only if you give me feedback in my comments ;)

Yes, I just emoticonned.

Fin.

HELP!!!!!

I chose the name "Off the Wall Greetings" because I'm selling WALLpaper envelopes and snarky off-beat cards and I liked that the name covered both.

How do I make my banner and visual branding cover both? Something that won't put off my business card envelope clientele or my poop card purchasers?

Apparently, Wisconsin just paid $50,000 for a new logo and slogan, so I no longer feel too bad about my own troubles rebranding myself. (Thanks to Elizabethjewelry for posting the article to the Etsy forums.)
Branding and marketing and image are a whole huge businessy beast unto themselves, and while I like to think I'm pretty good at them, it's much harder and scarier to do for yourself. So, help! You can see my banners below and vote, but no one sounds too enthused and I'd love some suggestions, ideas, or HELP of any sort. Preferably costing less than $50,000.

PS- Here's two more banner attempts to add to the voting pile

Banner 4:
Banner 5:

Off the Wall Bannering

I've stopped making excuses and started making my new banner for Off the Wall Greetings. Basic concept from the start (which gave me problems until I realized today I could just scan wallpaper and it comes out beautifully) was to have a background that is very recognizable as wallpaper, preferably nice and a little shmancy, with a bold and slightly quirky font that looks a little like handwriting or stenciling but not beating you over the head with it. So here's a start, open for voting, comments and suggestions. You are my market research, so feedback is welcome and may be taken to heart or ultimately ignored.
Thanks in advance!

Banner 1:
Banner 2:
Banner 3:

Change my banner?

Do I need to change my Etsy shop banner? I've gotten feedback here and there about it needing to change and maybe incorporating some of my cards into it. I don't really want to lose the branding of my scissors thing, but when enough people make the suggestion, I start taking it seriously. My banner originally didn't have the sheep, but enough people told me to tie it in better with my shop that I thought that was a simple idea that kept the rest of the look I liked.
Original banner:Banner with sheep (currently in my shop):Do I give up on the scissors and go for something that's entirely my card photos and my name?Or how about something completely different, like the googly background I created for my blog? This is just a rough version:
And of course, it has to go with my shop. I can't make decisions anymore. My life is so hard.