Local Flavor: ArtStir Denver

Art and design aren’t just in the big hot spots like New York and San Francisco. Great design is in your own backyard, and it’s important to support your local art community. It’s the smaller cities and towns that don’t get the big funding and recognition, so it’s even more important to help them out.

This past Memorial Day weekend in Denver, there was a great local art and design festival called ArtStir. It’s a pretty large marketplace that features only Colorado artists and was named best new art festival by Denver Westword. It featured over 140 booths and it partnered with a great area non-profit called VSA Colorado / Access Gallery that helps people with disabilities make art.  Despite our pouring rain, ArtStir had a great turnout, and it was inspiring to see the Rocky Mountain State support their own art community.

ArtStir was directed by Samuel Schimek, who started the I Heart Denver Store. It’s an unique souvenir shop in downtown Denver that only sells Colorado artists and has a higher quality design aesthetic. Their loot is definitely not your typical tacky souvenir shop tchotchkes. They sell stuff even a native covets and proudly wears or displays in their home.

I met a lot of seriously talented artists and designers, and bought some killer goodies. It was great to see the mediums span from pottery and tee shirts to notebooks made from old game boards to local culinary delights. Below are some photos of a few of the goodies I snatched and links to the vendors I loved.

• Coloradical: A Colorado Tee Shirt Company
• Just Plain Jane
• Becky Designs
• Schlayer Design
• Canned Goods

Next time you see an advertisement for an art or craft festival in your community, go. You’d be surprised what you would find, but even if it’s not your style, you need to drop by and show your support. I can’t wait to see ArtStir’s growth and success next year!

Beautiful messenger bag made from a coffee bean sack and lined with vinyl for durability. Created by Just Plain Jane, an artist from Littleton. Website: https://www.etsy.com/shop/JustPlainJane?ref=l2-shopheader-name

Creative Spark Journal by Designs by Becky where she makes notebooks using old game boards. Monopoly stole my heart, but she had Candyland, Clue and Sorry as well. Website: https://www.etsy.com/shop/beckydesigns

Creative Spark Journal by Designs by Becky where she makes notebooks using old game boards. Monopoly stole my heart, but she had Candyland, Clue and Sorry as well. Website: https://www.etsy.com/shop/beckydesigns

Tee shirt and stickers by Coloradical, a tee company located in Denver. Website: http://www.coloradicalshirts.com/

Awesome poster illustration seen at the I Heart Denver Store. Website: http://www.iheartdenverstore.com/

Awesome poster illustration seen at the I Heart Denver Store. Website: http://www.iheartdenverstore.com/

Awesome poster illustration seen at the I Heart Denver Store. Website: http://www.iheartdenverstore.com/

5 Sources for Creative Inspiration

Rodin had Camille Claudel, Fitzgerald had Zelda, and in this modern age, a lot of us resort to Pinterest for inspiration. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, there’s some good stuff there, but sometimes finding original inspiration is challenging. And then there’s the rapidly approaching deadline that can either foster that inspiration or lock it up nice and tight.

So, besides the usual stops of Pinterest, Instagram and Behance on the interwebs, this is where can you get creative inspiration.

1. Travel

My number one passion in life, besides design, is travel. I live to travel the world, and I find it’s my greatest source of inspiration. Being exposed to other cultures and other settings really heightens your awareness of what is around you. That awareness spawns new ideas and gets the creative juices flowing. Furthermore, making yourself take a break and take a vacation is so much better for your creative flow too. When you travel, take pictures of the little things—an interesting street a sign, a menu at a cafe, what people are wearing and file it away. When you’re stumped for an idea, they may trigger a new concept.

My favorite travel spots: Kenya, Paris, Venice and San Francisco

2. Quotes

I love the written word. I’ve always been an avid reader, and before I went to design school, I was an English major. I’m constantly inspired by beautiful language. Often, a great quote will inspire a great design with me. Whether it’s a typographic poster or something completely unrelated, that rush and high of hearing something inspiring will get your designy self moving. I keep an ongoing Word file where I paste in great quotes I hear. When I need a pick-me-up or a great idea, my first love of words is there.

A few of my favorite strings of language:

“Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.” —Steve Jobs

“You will never be completely at home again, because part of your heart will always be elsewhere. That is the price you pay for richness of loving and knowing people in more than one place.” -Wayfaring.me

“The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.” – Eleanor Roosevelt

“Miss Jean Louise, stand up, your father’s passin’.” —Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

3. Target

It doesn’t necessarily have to be Target, but the idea of going into a big store that sells a wide variety of merchandise, is a great place to gain inspiration. A great package design, a label, a pattern on a dress, going out to a store can really help trigger ideas. It’s easy and it’s convenient—sometimes going on an around the world adventure isn’t logical with a looming deadline, so just take a quick trip to your neighborhood store.

4. Magazines

Long before digital portfolio sites, there were magazines. Thankfully, there still ARE magazines. To me, magazines can be more inspiring than combing the web. When I get really stuck, I pull out my old issues of HOW, Communication Arts and my latest obsession, Uppercase. There’s something more thought-provoking to my process with a tangible thing than a phantom image online. Design magazines are great in that they have a lot of annuals that are filled with the best in the industry. It’s a great way to get inspired and push yourself harder with your own concepts.

Favorite Magazines: HOW, Communication Arts, Uppercase, Computer Arts, HGTV Magazine, Food Network Magazine

5. Your Design Community

Designers help inspire each other. I’ve found that our industry has a great amount of camraderie. Yeah, we’re all technically in competition with each other, but I’ve never seen such a tight bond among a profession as in design. We can talk ampersands for hours, help each other out with a constructive critique and love feeding off of each other’s creative energy. Find your local chapter of AIGA and get involved by attending events and meeting other designers. Network online through social media to meet other designers. If funds allow, try to attend a big design conference like HOW Live or AdobeMAX. Besides potential networking opportunities, your fellow designers are a fantastic resource to help get ideas flowing and listen to you vent when the client asks you to make the logo bigger. It’s awesome being part of a creative community and it will make you better at your craft.

Small Bites: March 23

We are 3 days into spring and kicking off another week. Here are the small bites that inspired my design main course this past week.

Fast Company did an article this week featuring a new website that FINALLY explains what the 3 letter airport code means. Have you ever wondered why it was LAX for Los Angeles or why Toronto is YYZ? As a global travel junkie, I definitely did. Whether you’re interested in travel or not, the website is beautifully done with gorgeous typography (hello, Futura!) and rocking a clean, modern grid.

As designers, our bosses/clients can make us crazy at some point. What if your boss was the President? AIGA did a great article this week interviewing the Creative Director for the White House. All those speeches and bill proposals that President Obama does needs graphic design work. Ashleigh Axios does great work with pretty dry material. She actually makes budget proposals visually interesting with clean, modern infographics.

Aaron Draplin is one of my favorite designers and the founder of the Field Notes notebooks. Draplin loves America and really promotes made in America and vintage Americana in his design work. This week he released a limited edition of his Field Notes called “Two Rivers.” This edition will benefit the Hamilton Wood Type & Printing Museum in Wisconsin. These are beautifully designed and printed and benefit a piece of American history.

I’m a total sucker for beer packaging design, which is odd given that I don’t drink. But, I think some of the best creative design work out there lands on beer packaging. HOW Magazine agrees and just recently released a book on beer label design, but check out their top 10 listed on their website this week.

And, finally, Typographica released their favorite typefaces of 2014 this week. Check out these beautifully designed typefaces from around the world.

Year of Learning: Hand Lettering Success

The journey continues as I keep plodding away at learning new things this year. I’m sailing along with web design and my hand lettering is improving. The past two weeks, i’ve worked on a project after doing an online class with Skillshare.com. I took Hand Lettering for Designers with Jessica Hische, who is the greatest lettering artist there is. She got her name around by doing a blog called “Daily Drop Cap” where she illustrated one drop cap per day. Granted, she is an amazing letterer and illustrator so every single one of her drop caps were phenomenal and would take me years to do, but it’s how she got her name out.

She now teaches the class on Skillshare, which is pretty decent. Overall, Skillshare is a pretty inexpensive resource to learn design and art skills and worth checking out. Anyhow, Her assignment was to take your favorite book and do a drop cap for the cover art design. Hische did this for a series of covers for Penguin Books.

The process was really interesting. She said that in order to make a great drop cap for the cover, you had to have read the book, because you needed to pull out details from the storyline to incorporate into your drop cap. We did some brainstorming exercises where we sketched our letters, but also made lists of important elements of the story. Like any brainstorming session, you start off broad and eventually focus in on the fine details.

Year of Learning: Can 10 Minutes Change Your Career?

This past week, I read a really interesting article on the AIGA blog: “How 10 Minutes a Day Can Change Your Design Career by author and designer Ram Castillo. His premise is that we all have 10 minutes to spare per day, no matter how busy we are and often times that is enough to learn a new skill. Frequently, we bite off more than we can chew, and when we make up our minds to learn something new, we think we must devote hours upon hours per day to it.

Castillo points out that 10 minutes is enough. You definitely have the room in your schedule and it makes a huge difference. He learned how to code his blog by just practicing 10 minutes per day. He always had an interest in magic and decided to learn some basic magic tricks over 10 minutes per day.

Castillo ended up using his 10 minute increments to write his new book, “How to Get a Job as a Designer, Guaranteed.” Imagine that? He wrote a book, starting out with just 10 minutes a day. Obviously, he had to devote more time to it, but that was his start and it got him to publishing.

I started to think about the changes I’ve made in the last several months in hopes of boosting my own career. I have a pretty short attentions span since I have ADD. Yet, I have managed to learn web design, dabble in development languages like Javascript and jQuery, start to learn hand lettering and juggle more freelance clients while working full time. Truly, I started by doing only maybe 20 minutes per day. The code was so overwhelming at first that that was all I could handle. Since I have a problem with consistency, I was more concerned with trying to do some code every day instead of doing it for massive amounts of time. So, it ended up being in small increments of time.

So, without realizing it, I have changed my career in 10 minutes a day. My goal for 2015 is to learn enough to build up my business so I can get to be a full-time freelancer at some point. With 10 minutes a day, I can keep up my code work, learn some of the new tools that are available in Adobe Creative Cloud 2014, send out solicitation emails to potential clients, review my resume, start rebuilding my website.

The 10 minutes a day idea doesn’t just have to apply to design or learning something new. It can change your life in other ways. Add 10 minutes of calm to your day or start meditating to help boost creativity and cut down on stress. Try reading a book for 10 minutes, it’ll help build the habit. Take 10 minutes to reconnect with a friend you haven’t talked to in a while.

The point is, small steps lead to big changes. Take 10 minutes away from your iPhone and start something new to improve your life.

Make What You Wanna Make

On Thursday evening, I had the pleasure of seeing “designy illustrator” Mikey Burton speak at the Denver Art Museum as part of the AIGA Colorado Speaker Series. Mikey is a funny guy who loves bears, breakfast and La Croix sparkling water (he says “La Croy” and claims only snobs say “La Crwa”). Despite some AV issues, he gave a great talk about his work, his process and showed his evolution from a designer to an illustrator from a student to his current status where he has clients like the New York Times, Converse, Playboy and ESPN.

Mikey Burton, a “designy illustrator” speaking at the Denver Art Museum as part of the AIGA Colorado Speaker Series.

What I really enjoyed about Mikey is that he presented work that were passion/side/self-generated (he hated all those terms!) projects that eventually turned into something. He redesigned book covers for his Masters thesis and received a C-, but two years later THE Steven Heller featured them on his blog and it launched into a line of tees and more book covers. He loves to draw food and draws what he eats every day, then Tumblr asked him to make a food tee shirt they could sell. They were his best projects, because he was creating work he wanted to create, without the pressure of a deadline or agenda of seeking a job. His passion and abilities were reflected in that work and it did lead to something professionally.

So many of us designers get stagnant in our work and bogged down by the job, that we forget why we got into design in the first place. It is our love, our passion, but the day to day and tight deadlines get in the way of that love. Most of the designers we little people look up to do encourage side projects, but it’s hard to follow that sometimes. For one thing, finding the time is a challenge, we get burned out and need the downtime, but I also think it’s a thing in the back of our mind that we secretly hope it’ll turn into something.

Mikey’s words really resonated with me—”Make what you wanna make and be patient and focus on your craft.” On my drive into work this morning, I was listening to Debbie Millman’s podcast “Design Matters” with the creators of The Great Discontent, a creative blog and magazine. They were quoting a friend of theirs, but they said the best advice they received was “learn to be content with the discontent” and then you can pursue your dreams.

Do your job and do it well, strive to do it better and create better work, but don’t forget to make the work “you wanna make” and find your passion for the craft you fell in love with again.

Local Flavor: Design Happenings in Colorado

Design is everywhere. Good design is everywhere. Yeah, San Francisco and New York get all the glory and the envy, but the truth is that you can find great design and ways to get involved with your design community in your own backyard. Join your local chapter of AIGA. Contact some of your local design agencies and see if they’d want to meet up to talk, one creative to another. Look for groups on social media that promote design talk in your area.

For my Colorado readers, here are some events taking place in the Rocky Mountain state in February.

The Colorado Springs chapter of AIGA is hosting Shop Talk on Tuesday, February 10. The owners of Authentic Form and Function, a digital agency, will be there speaking on what it’s like to work with distributed teams. One owner lives in Chicago and the other in Denver, and they’re going to talk about how they make it work. It will be at The Machine Shop in Colorado Springs. The event is free, but you need to RSVP through the AIGA website.

Type-Ed is coming to Denver for typography workshops. They’re doing a beginner class for students and an advanced class for seasoned designers. Go and get your ampersand on!

The Denver Art Museum is proud to continue their AIGA Speaker Series with illustrator Mikey Burton coming on February 19. Mikey has had impressive clients like Target, Converse and Esquire and will be speaking on how self-motivated projects can lead to client work. Register today!

And, finally, the really big news—TypeCon 2015 is being held in Denver! Type geeks who spend hours studying fonts and type anatomy get their payoff with a 5-day conference on type in the Mile High City. The conference isn’t until August, but people interested in volunteering to work the conference are asked to attend an information meeting in Denver on February 5 at 5:30pm. For more information, read their blog post.

Creative Exercise: Redesign This Beer Label

I’m on the board for the Colorado Springs chapter of AIGA. One of our monthly events is Drink & Draw, where creatives in the community get together to hang out, drink beer and get away from the screens to do some old school drawing. Each session has a theme to help direct the exercise. The one we did this month went over so well, I thought it’d be fun to propose to you readers.

Mass Transit Logo, copyright Bristol Brewing Company and Luke Flowers Creative

Local craft brewery, Bristol Brewing Company, has some awesome labels designed by Luke Flowers Creative. We decided it would be fun to redesign the Mass Transit label, but you had to use the style of one of the famous designers we admire.

Choose from one of the following designers:

• Aaron Draplin
• Louise Fili
• Ryan Putnam
• DKNG
• James Victore
• Saul Bass

Here is my humble effort of an attempt at Aaron Draplin. I am NOT an illustrator. Just trying to have fun with this thick-lined style and retro vibe. Post your results, this will be fun!

My feeble attempt at imitating Aaron Draplin’s style on the Mass Transit label.

Small Bites: January 12

In addition to posting regular blog content, I want to post a “Small Bites” section on Mondays. Here I’m going to share interesting links I find, little notes on design and hopefully, start off your week with some inspiration.

AIGA (American Institute of Graphic Artists) has launched a website celebrating design in honor of their 100th birthday. It’s beautifully designed and features some nice content. Check it out, here.

I’m generally obsessed with packaging design. I’ve never had the opportunity to work on a packaging project, but I spend many hours in stores and online checking out fabulous packages. The Dieline is a great resource for your daily dose of packaging inspiration. Today, they featured UU Branding, which does handmade utensils. They are stunning and so is the box they come in. Check it out here.

We all know animals have emotions. Some have even suspected that plants do as well. Graphic designer Sarah Hyndman is going so far as to say that fonts have emotions too. Probably most of us in the design community believe it! Here’s an excerpt from her TEDxBedford event. She’s also just released a new book, Type Taster. Preorder it today and choose one of the limited edition covers.

Java of the Week

Granted, coffee has nothing to do with graphic design, but it is definitely the fuel of all graphic designers. And, frankly, most of us are serious java snobs. We like fancy pants coffee just like we like fancy pants papers and fonts. I’m using a site called Go Coffee, where you can order tons of different gourmet, organic, fair trade coffees from small roasters around the country. Their website design leaves something to be desired, but they have a great selection, reasonable pricing and fair shipping. I’ve been trying out the Equator Roaster’s Bouchon Blend. It is the official coffee for Chef Thomas Keller’s restaurants. Really, really smooth stuff and a nice dark roast. Push through those looming deadlines with a cup of this.