Another goal for 2013 smashed by me, Vanessa!

It’s been on my list of things to do for about 3 years or so… submit a design for a Minted.com challenge. I’ve loved the idea, but the actually sitting down and looking at the current design challenge, thinking of an idea and creating the said idea, just never came about. Until yesterday, I just sat down and started sketching on the ipad’s paper53 app and my new bamboo stylus from my parents for Christmas.

The challenge this time is an art print, versus their standard more invitation/greeting card theme. From yesterday, I have a full sketchbook of ideas, but the one I created for my first submission was the most solid design, one that I could see it in a lot of little nurseries. Here is what I created…

Now I need all my lovely family and friends to go check it out and vote for me – yes please! I’m hopefully going to try to submit a few more ideas before the deadline on January 31, then voting begins. Critique, comment and when voting begins, vote! Here is the link to my design “Bowtie Essential“

I’m happy to report I’m making progress on a few of my goals for 2013.

I really want do a completely new site for myself to drum up more freelance projects. Part of that involved a new mac, yay! However, that also meant a new Adobe Creative Suite to purchase, boo. So instead of buying the software up front (over $2000), I’m trying out their Creative Cloud ($29/month) which gives me access to ALL adobe programs. While in the past I’ve only bought what I needed to complete my work, I now have access to brand new programs, which I’m hoping inspires me to learn a few and expand my knowledge. One of them being Muse – while I know how to design websites in Dreamweaver, Muse promises to do the same yet in a InDesign styled application and eliminates knowing code.

While I need to play around with Muse a bit before I can master it, I figured I might as well try to re-do my site by using Muse. Before getting full fledged into Muse, I need to come up with 1. A mood board, so that I know the design direction this site will go, and 2. I want to mock it up all in photoshop first and then recreate in Muse. I know this might seem backwards, but since I know Photoshop way better, I can quickly get my dream site laid out before heading over to Muse and am completely lost for a bit while I learn.

So step 1 is complete, introducing my mood board (above). A moodboard really helps set the tone for the site, I felt really lost until I had it clearly laid out and how it would look together. If you compare it to my current site, you will see the similarities. I feel like this is completely my style still. What I did to confirm my design and style is, I headed on over to my pinterest account. In there I took a look at trends in home style, design, and fashion that I’ve pinned… stripes, floral, primary colors, etc. From there I could tell my style was still dead on, so I embraced the color scheme and patterns.

Next up, my site designed in photoshop, then translated to Muse! I’m hoping as part of my etsy shop launched, I have options for people to have me customize their blogs similar to this. I’d come up with a moodboard for them, and then translate that to their blog.