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.

Color Decision!

My internet is being fussy and flaking out on all sorts of things so I can't post the post I was going to post.

Instead:

These are my colors. I'm making a decision. Time to get my stamp made and design myself some business cards and start filling the shop!

(other post was about moving and condo, AKA 99.9% of my brain space right now. Hopefully postable tomorrow.)

Color Thought

Color by COLOURlovers

Far from perfect, but I was reading How Color Choices in Stores Can Influence Your Shopping Decisions (again, found through COLOURlovers.com) and I'm thinking I want a combination of light and dark greens accented with something bright in the yellow/orange/red area for subliminal messaging purposes (placating and wealthy but fun and active!) except just those colors looked ugly so I played with them until I got this thing which I could live with.

Other potential favorite:

Color by COLOURlovers

If I go with the yellow "optimism" concept instead:

Color by COLOURlovers

thoughts?

Also, I have an econ post coming as soon as I write it...must...write...it...

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: