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  • 06/10/14
  • Comments: 0

Art Shop

I started selling my illustrations on Redbubble and Society6. My experience until now is that Redbubble works better, easier and I made several sales there already. While Society6 has more painful formatting process and I didn’t make any sales there yet. So the former is the better option I think for artists and designers.
tb,1200x1200,small.2

Find on Redbubble
Find on Society6
  • 06/10/14
  • Comments: 0

Building my online classroom

Snapshot 4:9:13 5:42 PM

I have been working actively on designing the online classroom for my new spring design course. There are many services that offer hosted classrooms (my favorite one is Lore). One problem that I have with many LMS (learning management systems) is that the interface is busy, ugly and confusing or it can not be customized as much as I want. So I ventured to design the classroom myself using WordPress and different plugins.

It is very clean, minimalistic and metro-inspired design. The idea is to make the learning content the main focus of attention (basically taking as much as possible of the browser screen), while navigation is easy and is out of the way (slim icon menu on the left). The front page offers yet another way to quickly navigate content (touch screen friendly). Of course the website is responsive.

Hopefully students will like it too! It will probably improve once I start getting feedback from users. To be continued!

  • 08/03/13
  • Comments: 1

Quick redesign

backgr2

These months are my busiest during the year with many website projects. On top of this I redesigned Design Garden. The old look was seriously outdated and did not reflect my current understanding of good design. Not that this design is perfect now. It was very hasty and squeezed among other projects. It is still work in progress!

The background image is a photo of my working space.

Other news are my  classes that start in May. I will be teaching hand drawn design, how to create clip art and graphics for web and branding.

  • 08/03/13
  • Comments: 1

Latest Design Projects

These are few of the projects on which I have been working in the last months. There is much more to show but I have been very busy lately with new projects and TheInkNest.

1. Logo and banner design for The Pancake Events. Lauren likes feminine floral and elegant designs.

2. Logo and website graphic design for Mon Petit Monde. Swiss shop with assortment of children furniture and nursery decor. The owner, Justyna is a work-at-home-mom who started a new business. It is always inspiring to work with such women and to exchange baby photos.

3. Banner design for Planeta Vino. I was craving vacation while designing this banner. I don’t want to say I was craving wine because that would sound a bit like alcoholism. But defininetly the feeling of sipping wine in Spain in a warm sunny afternoon.

Website Design – Harmony Tree Learning Center

New website design - Harmony Tree

The old website design of Harmony Tree

The old website design

Harmony Tree new logo

Harmony Tree new logo

It is a pleasure to write about the redesign of Harmony Tree Learning Center’s logo and website. The center offers tutoring programs to school age students. They were looking for some whimsical, welcoming graphics, artistic organic logo, easy navigation for the website and more professional, polished look all around.

For this project I asked my sister Iglika to join me in creating the designs. She has such a happy and cute style of illustrating children and was perfect for this job. With my art direction she created some beautiful images which I implemented in the logo and website.

The whole process was smooth and Grace (who supervised our work) gave us plenty of creative freedom. Visit the website for some eye candy and more information:
harmonytree.org

Design Garden (Sabina) has been amazing to work with. She designed our learning center’s website and was able to capture the feeling I wanted when people visited our site. She was very responsive during the process and her communication and follow ups were great! She really paid attention to what I wanted for the site & gave great advice to what would work and what might not. Her designs are creative and unique, truly unlike any other I’ve seen out there while I was in the process of choosing a website designer. I am so happy with this experience that I am already in the process of hiring her for another job! I highly recommend her to anyone out there looking for a talented graphic design artist!

Grace Han

Blog Design – Babushka Boutique

Babushka Boutique blog design

Babushka Boutique

Neva has a charming little boutique for clothes and accessories. Last year I designed her logo and this year she decided to have a new blog design. She likes lace and flowers, artistic feminine designs.

Visit the blog for more information: babushkaboutique.com

Sabina was very patient and took the time to deliver what I wanted. Her website designs are awesome and eye catching. She completed everything so quickly and was responsive to all my questions. It was a pleasure to work with her.

Neva, Babushka Boutique

Blog Design – Creating Your Lotus

Creating Your Lotus blog design

This project has been a new venture in the world of spiritual blogging. Yasmina writes about religion and spirituality. I was inspired by her explanation of creating your lotus. She wrote that the lotus rises every day from the depths of the dark pond to reach the light. This immediately created a visual in my mind of a lotus coming from the footer of the blog to the header where it reaches rays of light.

Visit her blog to learn more: http://creatingyourlotus.com

I highly recommend Sabina/Design Garden! She created my blog: CreatingYourLotus.com … She cares about every little detail of the design process and she pours her creativity and passion into her designs. She listened to and applied everything that I desired, giving helpful suggestions where needed, never forcing her opinion. She believes that customer knows best. She promptly answered every email, no matter how silly or complex the question. She went the extra mile and guided me into hosting, SEO, and every aspect of blogging that had nothing to do with designing… In my book that’s consulting and should be an extra cost, but it wasn’t, she did it willingly. I went from zero knowledge to working my site with ease. I don’t plan on going to any other designer and I don’t think you should either. I’m most grateful and ABSOLUTELY thrilled with Sabina’s professionalism and awesomeness. Check out my blog at the address above to see her creative mastery in action! I vote 10 out of 10.

Yasmina | Creating Your Lotus
  • 15/06/12
  • Comments: 3

Latest Design Projects

I had some fun projects lately.

1. Aura Dog is a website and Etsy shop that sells crystal charms for animals. This is really a new territory for me. I learned about singing bowls, homeopathic crystals and Chakra symbols. At some point I drew all Chakra symbols with the wrong colors because I had no idea that there are specific colors for each one. It was a challenge to depict the energy that comes from the crystals and all objects in the banner. I used some watercolor brushes for this purpose. Also I made portraits of the 3 cute pets of Christina (the shop owner).

2. A logo design for Resort Jewelry Stores. I had fun drawing small houses inspired from pictures in Aspen and other resorts. I think we arrived at a logo which is both elegant and has a relaxed, fun feeling to it.

3. Redesign of the Photo Card Boutique logo. I liked their previous logo as well. They are now changing direction in their business, adding new products and they needed something different. The one thing that we kept from the previous logo is the star. I think the new logo fits very well with their products as one can see on their Facebook page where the new branding is implemented.

4. The final version of the banner for the Three Sweet Ps blog. I wrote before about the design process of this banner. The client has a wonderful blog where she writes about her family of 3.

5. Logo design for Pucker Up Pretty. This is a business that provides photo scenes for weddings. I learned about the existence of the Louis Ghost chair. Honestly, I didn’t know that plastic chairs can look that fancy.

  • 15/06/12
  • Comments: 3

Website Design – Natalie Spencer

Natalie Spencer Website Design

Natalie Spencer Logo DesignNatalie's website background illustration

Natalie Spencer’s business is counseling and consulting (psychotherapy for children, teens, and adults). She is also a school counselor with focus on schooling, college and diversity.

We worked with Natalie to develop a nature related theme for her logo and website. People often associate counseling with – peace of mind and renewal. Using nature-related elements in design can bring such feelings.

The logo combines a heart, a helping hand and nature elements. The strong focus on the heart is what Natalie feels represents best her personal style.

Visit her website for more information: www.nataliespencer.net

If you are looking for branding or web design services, I highly recommend Sabina. Before I contacted her, I had worked with another designer and was underwhelmed with the end product. I am happy I found Sabina because she did a fantastic job creating my website and branding.

Natalie Spencer | Natalie Spencer Counseling and Consulting

Work in progress – Banner Design – ThreeSweetPs

Working on a new banner for a personal blog. It is a complex banner which unites many elements meaningful to my client like – the mountains of Utah, photo camera, Lily (as her daughter’s name), Harry Potter books (her favorites to read), washable baby diapers and more. The theme is “Family of three that loves to read”.

I am often asked about my design process. It is really hard to explain what I do because it has become an intuitive process. From experience I know how to approach the theme and how to make it work. As you can see from the image above: (1) I start by creating the graphics on paper and there is really no composition to the moment when I move them in Illustrator (2). Coloring the banner is one of the last steps (3).

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