friday favorites - christmas cards

I love Christmas cards. I love designing them and I love addressing them. I love stamping each envelope with beautiful holiday postage and I love sending them off to sit in frosty mailboxes until they are happily discovered. And I very much love receiving Christmas cards. I love finding a brightly colored envelope amidst a stack of bills, and for that happy moment, the sight of that card fills my whole heart with pure Christmas delight. (If you're reading this, pretty please add us to your Christmas card list.)


If you're on MY Christmas card list (which you undoubtedly are, if you're reading this), lucky you! Because this is my first Christmas designing an "us" Christmas card, and our us Christmas cards are going to be so, so cool. (Yes, I already have them planned out...) Come December, look for a pretty treasure from us in your snow covered mailboxes.

Christmas 2007 card design 

busy.

So, working on 10 projects at once is what I seem to do best…

friday favorites - cranberry muffins

I love cranberries, and I love love cranberry muffins. Vegan cranberry muffins, to be precise. You can love them, too.

(click photo to enlarge for recipe)

peacock card

 

 

friday favorites (3 days late) - autumn

Autumn is perfectly glorious. I love how it is just so easy to take an amazing photo in autumn, because the trees do all the work. Bursting with color, just waiting for you to notice their beauty. So beautiful and really, there is nothing like the smell of autumn. This past weekend was a joyous celebration of love and autumn.

Friday night came cold and blustery, the perfect kind of evening to stay inside, light the fireplace, and bake a spicy apple pie. I absolutely adore foods that smell like fall, and apple pies are truly autumn, through and through. And nothing beats eating hot-from-the-oven pie in the firelight with a handsome hubby.

Saturday. Bundled up in warm layers, we drove out to Treinen Farm and saw oh SO cute baby kitties and chickens and horses! We had great adventures in the pumpkin patch, and found the perfect pumpkins. And our pumpkin choices really did reflect our very different personalities...

And we went home and carved our pumpkin treasures.

On Sunday we drove out to Devil's Lake State Park after church and frolicked, (yes, frolicked), in forests painted with pure autumn delight. The leaves were breathtaking. And my husband has the bluest blue eyes. Autumn is a good season for him, because his eyes simply dazzle when surrounded by fall colors. We took countless pictures, and pretended we were pioneers on a journey to Oregon. Nothing, nothing can beat bright autumn rambles, mysterious and imaginative, with my Timmy's hand in mine.

And when, at the end, I regretted wearing ballet flats to go hiking, Timmy carried me.

One Year.

One year ago today, October 13, 2008, Timmy and I decided to get married. (He did not officially propose to me until December 13th -- but that is another magical story.) We had been dating for four months, and suddenly our relationship became perfectly clear and we both knew. Just knew that when we gazed into each other's eyes, forever was staring back at us.

A year ago today, I began planning my wedding, set for June 20, 2009.

One year goes by so, so quickly... and now I am 4 months married, the happiest I have ever been in my entire life.

Now that the Apple Cafe project is mostly over, I will be putting my efforts back into my freelance design work, and highlighting some of my recent wedding designs.

Apple Cafe - Part Five

We are done.

Saturday, October 10th had been marked for months on our calendar with a huge "REVAMP DAY" across the date. And all of our work and efforts took shape and became something real:

 

 

 

As we stood, looking at our creation, Timmy turned to me and said, "Is it everything you hoped it would be?" And, even though my eyes had already picked up on several things that needed tweaking, I smiled back into his sparkling blue eyes and concluded, "Yes, it really, truly is."

I regularly design logos, greeting cards, wedding invitations, and brochures. Individual pieces of something bigger - it is easy to design a postcard that does not necessarily need to blend into a cohesive theme. But, to design an entire identity. To create a whole marketing campaign. To start from absolutely nothing.

I did it. And now I know I can do anything.

To view all of the revamp photos, go to: picasaweb.google.com/rb.obrien7/AppleCafe#

friday favorites - creating treasures

I love to create treasures for those I adore. I love to create something special out of raw materials - to me there is nothing more satisfying. In my mind, I feel like there is absolutely nothing I can not create, if I really put my mind to it. (This confidence does not, however, extend to baking adventures. I can make anything look pretty, but it may not taste good...)

This weekend is my darling husband's birthday. He loves to wear prettily decorated shirts, so I decided to custom make him one.

I bought a pretty, white collared shirt and a packet of iron-on transfer paper. I designed the front, back, and side graphics in a style reminiscent of his very favorite clothing brand, English Laundry.

I then used the iron on transfer paper to transfer the images to the collared shirt. Iron on transfer paper is incredibly easy to use, and really opens up a world of possibilities! (I desperately want a screen printer, Yudu, but until then, iron on transfers work wonders.)

The result? A very happy husband. :)

(shirt design on back)

 

(design on front and cuffs)

Apple Cafe - Part Four

Marketing
When developing a marketing campaign, we determined our different types of customers, and what message would be most applicable to their lives.

Our goal for the first month after the switch was to create awareness of our "new things". In addition to a new look and a new name, we spent hours creating new smoothies, a new line of iced coffee drinks, new advertising, and new promotions.

New Smoothies
Because the original EN smoothie names had been borrowed from a friend, we had to rename all of the Apple Cafe smoothies. I love naming things, and definitely enjoyed some of the name switches. Now, doesn't Raspberry Radiance sound so much tastier than Raspberry Rave?

Additionally, we created three new smoothie recipes. This is not quite as easy as it sounds. Tim is amazing, and spent hours researching popular smoothie flavors, calculating the perfect blend of ingredients. And the result was well worth the effort:

New Iced Coffee
We expanded our coffee line and introduced three tasty new iced coffee drinks:

New Supplements:
Supplement sales account for a huge margin of our profit. Tim researched and found several exciting new supplements to bring in to Apple Cafe.

In addition to bringing in new supplements offerings, we also reorganized the existing supplements, making room for our "shelf talkers". These small signs sit next to the supplements, catching the customers' eyes, and explaining why this particular vitamin or supplement is beneficial. They are meant to entice and create interest. We kept the design simple and clean, with a larger "headline" proclaiming an eye-catching statement.

New Promotions
We spent hours of time and research, coming up with fresh new promotions for Apple Cafe. Our goal was to generate excitement and create interaction with our customers.

New Kids' Menu
Kids love things that are "just for them." EN Organic Smoothie Bar was not at all kid-friendly. No photos, no bright colors. We realized this was a huge market we had not even begun to tap into. So we created a Kid's Menu and Kid's Pick marketing campaign.

EN did offer Kiddie size smoothies, but the kid creativity ended there. So we created an entire Kid's Menu, full of healthy snacks that parents could confidently let kids choose from. For the Kid's marketing, I put a new twist on our apple logo, placing it upside down and sideways on the page. This adds a spark of playfulness and silliness, an element that appeals to children. Bright colors and crisp photography show off our Kid's Menu offerings.

Additionally, we started a new Kid's Pick program. Kid's absolutely love to choose things for themselves. Even if they only have two options. We created options, included a fun toy, and placed it all at kid's eye level.

And every other Tuesday is Kid's Day.

Apple Cafe - Part Three

Photography
Whoever said a picture is worth a thousand words was very, very right. Photographs catch eyes as people hurry by, stirring the appetite and creating a want. Our entire goal is to create that want, that desire for that customer to purchase what we're selling. People may miss words, but they never miss a picture.

And children, well they may not be able to read, but they notice everything. Nothing sells more than children pleading for a treat. But how can they ask for a smoothie, when, to their eyes, those smoothies don't even exist?

We made those smoothies come alive in a grueling 8 hour photo shoot.

When designing the smoothie photography shots, I determined that, to keep a cohesive, modern look, we would shoot the smoothies on a blank white background, with a straight on perspective. Each smoothie was carefully groomed and surrounded by its respective ingredients; strawberries, blueberries, chocolate, etc.

For the rest of the photography, I followed a similar shooting style. Although I did mix up the perspective on some shots, my photography retains the same simplicity throughout.

Sidenote: The best part about food photography? Getting to eat the props. Sometimes I like to pretend that the strawberries and blueberries auditioned for a "fruit modeling" job in my pictures. We picked the very prettiest fruits, shining them up and placing them just so. And sometimes I like to think that these pretty fruit models were just so delighted to live forever in my photographs. Sometimes I think they probably dreamed about this moment their whole fruity lives.

And that is what I thought about as I ate my fruit models.

friday favorites - Paris

Paris is beautiful everywhere. Every building is ornately carved and adorned with statues, every street is lined with cafes and flower stands... and the Parisians are just so, so beautiful,too. It smells beautiful, sounds beautiful, and feels beautiful. The air is heavy with romance and magic, full of a bright expentancy for beautiful happenings. Even their language is beautiful. "Bonjour!" rolls off your tongue so smoothly, like a musical score.

Tim and I spent four beautiful days in Paris on our honeymoon, surrounded by flowers and French. Notre Dame was just as magnificent as the photos promised, and we picnicked on the lawn in front of the Eiffel Tower.

In London I felt like a tourist, in Ireland I was a fairy, but in Paris, I was a princess.

P.S. I had been warned that sometimes the French are a tad unfriendly to bright-eyed American tourists. I did not meet ONE unfriendly Parisian. They are perfectly lovely, and beautiful.

rose card

poster design

flatfoot 56 is coming to Prairie du Chien, WI
I got to design their poster. :)