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.

DaLove for DaFont

Whenever I tell people about dafont.com I feel like I'm giving away some great trade secret. But that's a little like assuming that showing people the library means they're all going to write best-selling novels.

I am a font nerd. It probably happened long before I worked for American Greetings, but while there I had access to their entire collection of proprietary and non-proprietary fonts, and sweet mother of Garamond it was beautiful. A sentiment's feel can change entirely based on the look of the letters used.
Case in point:Same "three little words," but four very different sentiments.
Playful, romantic, plain (Times New Roman just for contrast, though it can be a useful font and has its own feel and indications, t00) and homicidal. You don't send the second one to your brother or the last to your mother (unless you're me and think it's funny).

This is all terribly important (well, not Darfur important) for my cards, especially the ones I do that are just text with no other art (i.e. the "don't spend it all in one place" and "thank you" cards I do with the wallpaper envelope things). It's been particularly on my brain because now I'm making "have your people call my people" cards to go with business cards as little somethings to give when/after you meet new networky types and want them to actually remember you and your business card instead of sticking it in their pocket/wallet and losing it forever or just not giving a flying fig. I spent quite some time on dafont rejecting font after font for being not friendly enough or too casual and on and on and once I'd narrowed it down to a few I tried them out on mock-up cards and found a winner: Labtop by Apostrophic Labs. We'll see if it stays the winner long-run, but for now, the first batch of "have your people call my people" cards are getting printed up that way and hopefully listed on Etsy this weekend.

And where do I get all my fonts? Dafont.com. They are free. Yes, that's right, free. Font designers are wonderful creatively sharing people. Since I've started selling my stuff I try to only download the fully "free" fonts instead of the "free for personal use" ones so I don't do anything illegal/evil. I should try to contact the designers of some of my favorite fonts and interview them for my blog. That would be swell.

I need to eat something now.