sarah vail

Invitation to Love: City Garden Party

Posted on July 12, 2017 by

Last summer we got in touch with Michael Owen, a local artist we adore, to design and install a mural to add a little life to our back patio space.

We didn’t give the mural the celebration it deserved last year, so we decided to have a city garden party in early June. I knew I would need some help with the planning, so I called on my girl Heidi at Casa Pena Designs for some assistance.

If you’re interested in event design, take a look at the rough plan for this party.

I love the mural so much and wanted to try to share it in a tactile way; I wanted everyone to have a part of the mural.

I tried to accomplish this by creating and printing invites featuring the mural design. Once printed, I wanted to send to invites through the regular mail – everyone loves to receive mail.

Because Michael Owen let us keep the stencil (which I cherish), I used it as the starting point and went from there. I started with another concept in mind, but here’s what I came up with:

save the date: an STD of cosmic proportions

Posted on July 10, 2017July 10, 2017 by

I really think it’s great that the acronym for save the date is STD. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do because I’m going to use every chance I get.

I’m getting married next May and the clock is ticking for getting the STD’s in the mail. I’m pretty particular about the look, feel and the cohesiveness of the invites to the theme (which I’ll get into later), so I’ve got full creative control here.

I knew I would get obsessive if I designed them myself, so I ordered a beautiful STD template from etsy so it could go to the printer and just be done.

In the meantime, I decided to spend a little time working on an STD to build my skills. After a round of edits, this is what I came up with:

This was first for me, so my hope is that I continue to build my skills and improve over time!

Action Item: To keep the momentum going, I’m going to put spend some time on an invitation and RSVP and will try to finalize a complete wedding kit

Business Card: Casa Pena Designs

Posted on July 9, 2017September 7, 2017 by

I had a blast with my first business card design and learned a lot in the process. Here is everything I learned, from beginning to end.

Client: My girl Heidi at Casa Pena Designs, an interior design firm

We’ve been talking about updating the CPD logo for awhile, but it hasn’t happened yet. In the meantime, a great networking opportunity made business cards a priority. I used the current logo as a point of reference.

Considerations: Heidi incorporates a lot of blues into her designs, and loves those clean lines

I wanted the design of her business card to represent her distinct style, and here’s what I came up with.

Design Program: Canva

After a few revisions, I completed the design. Heidi quickly double checked the details before uploading to Vistaprint.

Printer: Vistaprint

I have used Vistaprint in the past, so I knew they could turn the job around quickly and deliver a decent quality product. Plus, they almost always have a sale.

After the cards were ordered, we both realized that there was one little detail we had missed: the website was wrong. Luckily, Heidi was able to work some sort of web magic to resolve the issue.

When the cards arrived, the fonts were smaller than they looked on the screen, but otherwise, they looked great!

Lessons Learned:

Logos are Complex
I spent a lot of time researching logos and logo design before deciding that logos are far more complex than I thought. Perhaps I’ll go into it another time, but it’s worth noting as one of my major takeaways from this project.
Be Careful with Font Sizes
In particular, modern fonts on printed material. Next time, I won’t order 500 cards the first round, no matter how enticing Vistaprint makes the offer.
Confirm the Details
It did occur to me that I should get up from the computer and take a 5 minute break before uploading and sending to the printer, but we both just wanted to get the project done. Next time I’ll trust my instincts and try to have fresh eyes when I finalize the design.

business card series: network like a shark with this design

Posted on July 8, 2017July 8, 2017 by

I’ve been putting off re-entry into the working world for long enough. I’m finally ready to put in the work to see if doing what I love (cool design projects where the view from my desk includes my dog) can actually can generate an income. I know it’s going to be hard, but I’ve already got a lead.

Once I got that first lead, it gave me enough confidence to realize that I was ready to do this thing.

When I started seriously considering this option a few months ago, I had the idea to design a personalized set of business cards for myself. There’s a whole marketing/outreach/testing component to this idea, but let’s see how this part goes.

I want to give away the type of business card that might get hung on a cube wall (best case scenario) and looked at every day, but I’d settle for a double take before getting tossed in the recycling bin if it gets a visit to my website if you know what I mean.

Here’s the first one: