I collect inspiration. Magazines. Catalogs. Children's books. Direct mailers. You name it; if it has an interesting design, chances are I have it squirreled away.     Rarely do I sit down and ponder what grabbed my attention or really think about my own design aesthetic. Until Week 5 of Find Your Voice workshop, I had never really looked at my collection and identified why an individual piece or series of pieces spoke to me.   Where do you find inspiration?  

Fonts have personalities. They say a lot about who you are. My logo has always been a selection of two fonts, one soft cursive or handwritten form and one bold all caps selection.   I want my logo to say: Bold. Confident. Approachable. Personable. Fun. Fresh. Uncomplicated. Easy Going. all at the same time.     When it comes to type, one thing most designers will agree upon is limiting your font choices to two or at most three fonts. Up until recently there were five fonts in my branding: CK Ali's Hand Official Big Noodle Titling Bododita Regular Georgia Park Avenue   My extra fonts were in my logo. These fonts were hard to let go, even though in all honesty they hadn't matched the rest of the blog in feel for awhile. (The Purdue Online Writing Lab discusses how you can determine a font's personality .)   My discomfort with my logo really grew when I attended BlogShop . In class assignments, I found myself experimenting with CK Ali's Hand Official ...

One of my passion projects that I'm extremely excited about is Family Dinners at The Station. Today's font picks, Garamond, Lydian, and Pan Am, are inspired by that project and will be used in the menus I'm designing.     When I first began thinking about this project, I kept remembering holiday dinners at my grandparents in Novato, CA. Depending on the year, we'd have family members who had flown in from Southern California and Georgia and others who had driven down from Ukiah. During the course of the afternoon and evening, my grandfather would share stories from his travels; he was in the travel business and had gotten his start as a baggage handler at Pan Am. Often my grandmother and he would give us grandkids the toiletry kits they received. I grew up wanting to travel the world like they did.   While the days when air travel was glamorous and Maxim's catered the food are gone, the joys of coming together to share stories over a communal table are not. So w...

Bad things happen when you're in a hurry. When you skip your checklists. What kind of bad things? With fonts, funny characters happen.     I know better. I could have totally prevented this hiccup had I followed my checklist. It's there: "Type converted to outlines. Yes | No"   Do you have a production checklist that you follow?   First, let me take you back a couple of months to the beginning of the story. In early November, Blurb surprised all Alt Summit attendees with a gift certificate and instructions to make a book and bring it with them to Salt Lake City.   As you know back in November and December I was in the midst of rebranding, so I waited to start my book until the new branding was finished. (Originally I thought I wouldn't have time to do this project and had crossed it off my list.) This meant I started on the layout and photo processing in January, less than a week before the printing and shipping in-time-to-arrive-for-Alt deadline.   ...

Starting today and going through Sunday, I'll be sharing Alt Summit reveals with you. The first big reveal: my business cards.     How do you design? With a budget in mind? Or with a "sky's the limit" mantra?  

This time last year I started talking about rebranding the blog. Over the past couple of weeks, a design that spoke to me finally materialized. Thank you for your patience while I worked out the details.   Curious as to which masthead and which collage template I chose for the blog's new design? If you're following in an RSS feeder, please head over to the blog to take a look.     For our last homework assignment for Blogging Your Way Bootcamp , Holly gave us two options. The first option: redesign our blog if it wasn't focused and didn't support our vision. The second option: introduce a regular feature or series in the month of November. I immediately chose the second option.   It wasn't until the second course -- and the third course -- from Braid Creative that I realized the design of my blog wasn't quite there. I wanted a look that was fun and fresh. A look that was bold. How better to get attention than switch out a muted pastel color scheme? I also...

Business cards are key to forming a good first impression. And at Alt Summit people take the design of their cards very seriously. (Check out these round ups of favorite business cards from previous Alt Summits by Camille Styles ( 2011 , 2012 ), Creature Comforts , Food Nouveau , Kirtsy , and SHE PAPERIE .) While the conference is not until January, there are already posts on the Alt Blog about " The Importance of Business Card Design " along with tips .   Credits (clockwise from top left) : Ez Pudewa of Creature Comforts ; Camille Styles (2012); Kathleen Shannon of Jeremy and Kathleen / Braid Creative; Camille Styles (2011); Robin Miller of It's Robin with an i ; and Meg Biram of MIMI+MEG .   Maybe it's because I worked for a firm with many Chinese and Japanese customers early in my career that I consider business cards very carefully. If you're not familiar with how business cards are exchanged in China or Japan, here's a quick introduction. Parties ex...

Whether by phone, through email, or in the mail, I'm barraged by offers. I no longer answer my phone. I seldom reply to email. And, I rarely, if ever, pick up my mail from the mailroom. To get my attention one needs to be creative.     This week two items caught my attention. One - a package - succeeded because it never entered the mailroom; it got delivered to my desk.     Another got my attention through the choice of stamps the sender used.     What gets your attention?   Ciao Bella! Eden   Credits: All images taken by Eden Hensley Silverstein for The Road to the Good Life.

How do you pick what books you're going to read or add to your personal library? For me, it's three things: choice of fonts; page layouts; and content. Well, last night as I read Perfectly Kept House is the Sign of A Misspent Life: How to live creatively with collections, clutter, work, kids, pets, art, etc... and stop worrying about everything being perfectly in its place (* affiliate link ) by Mary Randolph Carter, I became mesmerized by a watercolor font.   Anyone know which font this is?   I picked up this book not just for its content, but mostly for its layout (which I'll talk about in a future post). The use of watercolor as a design element, in the chapter headings, for the drop capital, for the Boxed heading, and for a rule, intrigued me. It was mixed up with thread which separated the columns of text. The more I stared at this font the more I wanted it. (I collect Typography and Page Layout inspiration boards on Pinterest.)   Of course I got sidetracked f...

Images for my column headings have always challenged me. In many cases, I resorted to text on background colors to avoid matching heights and widths. For this blog, I wanted column headings on Washi tape which meant I had to overcome a few challenges in Blogger.     Blogger's Picture widget adds borders to all images. If there's a way to remove the border, I've failed to find it. By referencing images using the HTML/JavaScript widget I was able to eliminate the borders. This meant that all images had to be available online before they could be used in the blog's layout.   Once I knew how to add the images to the blog I started playing with positioning. I liked the action buttons on the same line as the labels.     Unfortunately, the initial column widths were to narrow to support this design. Once I had the layout close to working, it was time to add the headshot so you would know who I am.   Lately I'm wearing a hat in almost every photo (Krissia and...

My relaunch of this blog, which began slowly in November, may be finally past a design roadblock I've struggled with for months: what to do with my social media icons. I initially looked at icons provided by the various social media platforms. The problem with the "stock" icons? Their colors didn't coordinate with my blog's palette. I decided to go with white logos or icons on top concrete-colored Washi tape (link to zip file with the icons). First issue solved.     Next, for usability, I wanted to make it easy for people to see my handles. There's nothing I hate more than wanting to follow someone and having to guess at the handle. (My handles are inconsistent and have changed over the years; this makes guessing a frustrating endeavor.) I couldn't figure out an easy way to specify an Alt tag for an image that was added via Blogger's Picture widget. To get around this constraint, I paired the handle with the appropriate icon in the image. Now, instea...

It's no secret that I'm a sucker for cool packaging. Line up two products I've never tried before -- if I have no knowledge of either brand -- and I'll grab the one that's visually appealing. Imagine my delight when a package from The Honest Company arrived in the post.     Rarely does one find packaging that's so well thought out or consistent with a brand. The designer(s) of The Honest Company's packaging left no detail, no matter how small, untouched. (You can check out the actual product packaging in my " The Honest Company " Flickr photostream.) I'm highlighting the shipping box in this post as it's a brand component that many companies neglect to consider and one that I thought The Honest Company designed exceptionally well.     I typically don't look inside an empty box. When I looked inside the box from The Honest Company, I was surprised to see a thank you note.     Of course, I then examined all sides of the box as well ...

Earlier this month I came up with the idea of creating a 7x7 photo book of Gates' first 24 months. I think I've finally narrowed my picks for the last of the other two San Serif fonts to two choices: Big Noodle and Telegrafico. Both have very different personalities. Which is your favorite: Big Noodle or Telegrafico? Here's what each font looks like in the layout with the Serif font I chose: Berylium . (Remember that my inspiration for the layout of each page came from a package of tea which has one Serif font and two San Serif fonts.) I'm not sure which font treatment I like better. What's your preference? Big Noodle with Berylium or Big Noodle with Telegrafico? Big Noodle with Berylium Telegrafico with Berylium Both Big Noodle from Sentinel Type and Telegrafico by Salvo Nicolosi are available for free for personal use from Dafonts.com . (The other San Serif font used in the layout (not shown) is Tall Films by GemFonts, also available for free for personal use ...

Who doesn't love washi tape? Other than my husband. (I now have a Lincoln Beautyware kitchen wrap and paper towel organizer filled with washi tape of all sizes, designs, and colors and am constantly on the hunt for more as new patterns and colors are released each season.) Today I have a roundup that even he'll love: digital washi tape.     For those without an abundance of space or who prefer pixels and those on a budget, here's a roundup of some of the free washi tape downloads I've come across in my Internet travels. Tape strips (PNG) from &Cute Tape strips (polka dots) (PNG) from A Typical English Home Tape strips (stripes) (PSD) or (PNG) from Creative Comforts (site no longer online) Tape strips (PNG) : 6 from Bonjour! Our Life and A Little Inspiration Lace strips (PNG) from Sweetly Scrapped Old sticky tape ( JPG ) or Photoshop brushes from Fuzzimo Tape strips (PNG) from Designs By Miss Mandee Tape brushes (PSD) : 57 from Colorburned   Cre...

Everyone says babies grow up so quickly. So how do you capture these memories? Besides marking their height on a door frame? With a monthly photograph! One of my favorite blogs Making it Lovely has two series that I've loved following: Eleanor's Monthly Photos and August's Monthly Photos . Now that we're expecting our first baby, I'm thinking of doing a similar series once Gates is born. I want to be able to quickly create an album for the grandparents from these photos, so I'll be creating a 7x7 layout into which I'll drop the monthly photo. Why 7x7? I love the square format and Blurb has a 7x7 book option . With each photo, I want to capture a brief note about what Gates was doing, for example, now sleeping through the night or sitting up on her own. My layout inspiration comes from the packaging of my favorite tea, Steven Smith's No. 45. The photo will go where the logo is. (I'm not sure if I want to give the photo a sepia treatment or go black ...