BLOG – Leanne Padgett

Do The Thing

I’ve been working hard on some really exciting projects this year and I am so freaking stoked to finally share some stuff with you.

First off, there never seems to be enough time to update my online design portfolio, keep my blog current and self-promote. The end result is that even the closest people in my life don’t really know what I’m up to. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good problem to have! I’ve been so busy with freelance jobs from word of mouth alone, as well as with my day job as a Graphic Designer at Expedia, that I haven’t really had a chance to stop and breathe. But I’ve promised myself that I would try to make this more of a priority. Try.

Earlier this year, I pulled my portfolio website down (www.leannepadgett.com) and rebuilt it. It was time for a facelift. I made me a logo. Thanks to my fabulous and talented photog friend Erik Ferguson, I got some new photos taken. I decided it was time to get serious about this freelance business I’ve been running off the corner of my desk for the past few years.

A few months ago a colleague, Jill Binder, approached me with an idea for a productivity web app that she wanted me to design. She’s a developer so it was already wireframed, but in multiple iterations. She wanted my help with illustration, look & feel, and helping organize the iterations into one unified set of skins. Working with Jill was a genuine pleasure. Working with a developer who knows the biz makes a big difference on a project like this. She’s also a freelancer so she understands the roadblocks and challenges of balancing freelance and life. She was very patient with me, but gave me the little pokes when I needed them and helped me stay on track. I feel like I have grown and developed a lot over the course of this project and this year.

Here is the initial mood board I created for the project.

The app is called Do The Thing, and I ended up adopting “Do The Thing” as a personal motto. I reached the (now obvious) conclusion that there is only one way to build this business of mine, and that’s with a lot of freaking hard work. If I was feeling tired or overwhelmed, I would make a list and tell myself to start by doing one thing, one little item, and that was often enough to create momentum for myself.

Here are a few of the skins:

That’s all for now. I’m off to do more things! More updates still to come. Happy Friday, friends!

Album Design , Branding , Layout , Package Design , Print Design , Typography

Lady of the Night CD has arrived!

So this came in the mail yesterday!! I couldn’t wait to share. I also can’t wait for the album release party this Sunday at the awesome Biltmore Cabaret. It’s going to be a lot of fun. Shirley Gnome will be playing her smutty and hilarious tunes with a full band. Plus, she will be accompanied by hot burlesque dancers from Kitty Nights, which is sure to be a super sexy and fun time, as Kitty Nights always is. More photos of the final product coming soon!

Album Design , Branding , Layout , Package Design , Print Design , Typography

The Lady of the Night

To say I have always wanted to design an album is an understatement. When I was little, I used to spend hours listening to records while looking through the insert and studying lyrics with a thirst that I believe only a nerd living in a remote Canadian town before the internet was invented can truly understand.

So, when I found out through my friend Suzy Rawsome that our mutual acquaintance Shirley Gnome was looking for a graphic designer for her next album, jumped on it and sent her a message. I really wanted this project for my portfolio. But also, if you have never heard Shirley’s songs or seen her on stage, she has the voice of an angel and writes the dirtiest and most hilarious songs I have ever heard, which naturally was right up my alley.

Seeing Shirley on stage in her polyester sequined costumes and listening to her dirty folksy-country songs summons an image that is a little bit 70s Dolly Parton, a little Elvis and a little disco. The woman is in love with glitter. The choice was clear, I really wanted to opt for a vintage 1970s aesthetic, and luckily Shirley agreed.

We started a Pinterest board with album covers that inspired us:
http://www.pinterest.com/padgettmeister/cool-and-bad-album-covers/

A short Photoshop tutorial later, I learned how to accomplish those oh-so-important 70s light flares:

Shirley wanted the cover image to be her in the streets under a streetlamp. Due to time constraints, we weren’t able to put together a photo shoot, and I had already fallen in love with a photo that was taken of her during the live recording of the album. So we went with that and altered it with Photoshop.

Here is the final album cover:

We definitely wanted to include Shirley Gnome’s signature pink cowboy hat, since it was missing from the cover. Shirley had the great idea to put the hat on the cd, so when you pick it up, the top of her head would be revealed. I loved it! Here is what the inside of the cd case will look like, with and without the cd:

I felt like Shirley’s lyrics were just way too funny not to include, so we made a 4 panel booklet of lyrics, so people could sing along at home! We used some photos that Shirley had taken after a show, and used Photoshop to give them a similar look and feel.

For the type, We used Angel Tears by Billy Argel for the cover and Thirsty Rough on the song titles.

I am so happy to share with you this very big, awesome project! Now, I just can’t wait for the cd release party on February 8th at the Biltmore!

+Acumen , Human-Centered Design , IDEO

Design Kit: The Course for Human-Centered Design

You might remember back in October I enrolled in the online course Design Kit: The Course for Human-Centered Design, offered by Acumen and IDEO.org.

Part of the course requirement was to form a group of 4 people who lived locally, and would be available to give their time to completing the course. If we were unable to put together a group on our own, we were given the opportunity to connect with other students of the course online. I contacted my friend, Amelia, who is a terrific freelance graphic and web designer I met at the Vancouver Wordcamp 2014, and asked if she would be interested in forming a group. She immediately responded with a yes! And as a huge bonus, she had two more people in mind who would probably be interested in joining as well. So I was introduced to Susan Seto, an SFU graduate, marketing and business brainiac with a killer work ethic, and Jen Yamasaki, an amazing designer, fine artist and psych major. I was beginning to ask myself how I ever got so lucky to meet all of these amazing women. It all came together to quickly and easily, it was like it was meant to be.

It took us a while to come up with a name for our group, but we settled on Rascal Studio. Here is a photo from our first meeting:

Rascal Studio Group!

And our Rascal Studio logo, designed by Jen Yamasaki!

The course was all about designing for social change. This was our mission statement:

Rascal Studio is made up of four Vancouver-based creative rascals who believe in bringing clever ideas to drive social change in the community and around the globe.

We were presented with the following question:

How might parents in low-income communities ensure children thrive in their first five years?

We worked hard at brainstorming and thinking on this for a week or two, and we went about compiling a set of interview questions. We decided to try and interview as many parents, social workers, local teachers and experts in early childhood development as possible.

What came out of those interviews was really compelling. In almost every one of the interviews two things came up. Whether they were parents or experts, every one of our interviewees felt that the most important elements to ensuring that a young child thrived was emotional connection and nutrition.

After compiling all of our interview responses, we then identified our design challenge:

To increase awareness of best parenting practices amongst low-income communities in the Vancouver Downtown Eastside through engaging workshops and leadership initiatives.

We went back to the ideation / brainstorming phase to try and figure out how we would tackle our design challenge. After many discussions and brainstorming sessions, we decided the best way to approach this challenge would be to start a community group that would provide education, emotional support and guidance to low-income families in the DTES. It would be facilitated and run by fellow DTES residents and would give parents a chance to relax and provide a social atmosphere to connect and talk. Parents would also have the opportunity to listen to guest speakers who would provide information, support, encouragement and teaching materials. Dinner and snacks would be provided (sponsors listed below).

And so, Our Kitchen was born! Here’s the style tile that I created:

These are our proposed sponsors, who would help with supplying food and support:

As many low income people have limited access to computers, we decided to promote the evening with flyers. Amelia designed two flyers, one general promotional flyer to distribute to parents, community leaders, teachers and healthcare workers, and a second flyer designed for sponsor recruitment.

General Flyer:

Sponsor Flyer:

We also came up with a program schedule, made example workshop and take home materials and found a venue, the Vancouver Dodson House.

Well, I am even more excited to share this with you because amongst our peers we were voted number one out of 432 final submissions!!! We just got the news the other day and we are so incredibly happy. We worked really hard on this project and at times felt quite discouraged but we persevered and I am so grateful for that.

If you would like to see our final presentation, here it is!

RascalStudio_Challenge3_FinalPrototype

And my statement of accomplishment!

Cheers!

Wedding Design

Save-the-Date Postcards!

We got the postcards back from the printers! Just in time for Josephine to take with her overseas for the holidays. She originally didn’t want to do any print material for the wedding, she wanted to do all the RSVPs and Save the Date stuff electronically through the website. However, she changed her mind and requested that we have a small amount of 4 x 6 postcards made, to give to some of her overseas family who may not be quite as computer savvy.

We used Jukebox to print the cards, and I will definitely be back to use them again. They were awesome! Not only was their customer service superb, but the quality of the print job far surpassed my expectations.

Next, we will be working on fleshing out the website with all the important details. We are still looking for a theme that is easy to build on… More on that later!

Her color palette was so bright and fun and her idea to have a VW camper van-themed wedding has also been a blast to work with. I was also happy to have the opportunity to apply a typographic design to the Save-the-Date, as that was a challenge but an aesthetic that I really enjoy.

Josephine’s color palette.

The original electronic version of the Save-the-Date.

Uncategorized

2014 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 760 times in 2014. If it were a cable car, it would take about 13 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Uncategorized

Design School Tears

This was a little project I did for fun during school. It was intended as a self-promo item, but I ended up going with another idea. School was hard work, and lots of tears were shed over the past couple of years. I thought it would be funny to bottle them to give to people to prove how hard we all worked.

I finally got time to work on this some more so I made the bottle into a fake ad. I have gone through so many versions of this project, but here are some earlier iterations:

Here is the final version of the label and another version of the final ad layout with a brighter, more orange label. I drew the flourishes and graphic elements using Adobe Illustrator (except for the loop at the top, which was a glyph).

Branding , Layout , Package Design , Print Design , Typography

Vending Machine Design Fun

During the summer of 2013, I was hired to design two vending machines that lived inside a hardware store in Vancouver. This was a freaky job because I barely knew how to set up a production job this large in scale, and it was actually one of my very first real-life (non-school project) design jobs.

I always find creating a mood board for a project helpful for keeping a consistent design aesthetic. This project didn’t really require one, but I made one for my own purposes. This is part of a mood board that I created for this project.

My only regret was not using as many colors on the final vending machines as I could have, but I was hoping to do the labels for the water bottles with the colors from my original mood board. The client ended up keeping the generic labels and didn’t have a budget for the water labels, and I got all caught up and busy with school again and so never ended up doing the labels, which is a bummer.

Anyway, it took me a while just to find an image on iStock that best represented what the client had in mind for his machines. He told me from our initial meeting that he wanted the image of ice falling down the side of the machine, so that’s what we went with.

I then found a picture and altered it in Photoshop to make the colors more vibrant, added more ice cubes and tried to make it look as refreshing as possible by lightening the color. This was the result:

After laying out the type, we were ready to go to print and wrap this thing! I made a few iterations and sent them to the printer:

There were quite a few iterations and revisions, back and forth with the printers, who were, thankfully, quite patient and understanding of my graphic design rookie status.

And here is the end result! My very first very big and very real-life package design project:

Later, the client asked for a price decal to be applied to the following circled areas:

Here is what the price decal ended up looking like:

This was a really exciting, and really scary project just because of how new I was at design. But, I always say yes to a project that I think I can learn from, and this one presented a big learning challenge. It is fun to look back and see how far I have come with my design knowledge.

I didn’t originally blog about this project because I wasn’t sure if I really liked the final outcome of it. Of course there are things that I would have done differently if I had this project now, but I am very happy for this first job and how cool it was to work on such a large object, having only completed one year of school! Yay!

I keep thinking about doing the water bottle labels, just for a fun package design exercise. We’ll see if I can make time!

TedX Vancouver

TEDX Vancouver 2014

Last weekend I had the extremely good fortune of being given a free ticket to TedX Vancouver. The theme of the event was TILT. It was overwhelming and awesome and I got to help out at the photo booth, which was great fun, helping people come up with their “TILT moment,” which is basically your most memorable moment during TedX. Here was mine:

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For most of my adult life, I have had a familiar face. I have been been told by many, many people that they think they have met me before, or they ask if I have a sister, or even one time a person I didn’t know approached me at a party and started talking to me, thinking I was someone else.

The lady on the right was the one that thought she knew me from somewhere.

So while I was volunteering at the photo booth, these two really nice ladies walked up and one of them asked me if her hair was alright, before getting her photo taken. I told her she looked great. After the picture we ended up all standing around and chatting for a while afterwards, and the hair woman just kept looking at me and smiling. She finally said she was sure we had met before, but she didn’t know where or when. I told her that I had lived in Vancouver for twelve years until 2010 and had just moved back recently, so I wouldn’t be surprised if we had crossed paths at some point. We never were able to figure out how we know each other, but I just loved one thing she said to me. She said, “I am certain that I know you from somewhere, and I know this because you don’t look like anyone else.”

What a cool thing to say to someone! That really stuck with me, because I have always been told I look like someone else, it was super awesome to hear someone tell me I don’t look like anyone else. I thanked her for the compliment! Even as I write this I am smiling! I wonder if anyone reading this knows her.

At TILT, artists were scattered throughout the building, doing collaborative paintings (“artist mash-ups”) and of course all of the speakers were pretty amazing. Especially, for me, Victor Chan, who was irreverent and hilarious, almost to the point of making the audience slightly uncomfortable (or I was, at first). He spoke about mindfulness and having the ability to control his body, even the amount that he sweats, through meditation (because he said he hates doing laundry. haha). Victor also told an amazing story of being kidnapped in Afghanistan in the 1970s, being told that he was going to be raped and killed, and then the truck he was being transported in crashed on an icy mountain road, leaving only himself and two other kidnap victims alive. This was not the focus of his talk, though, he was more interested in speaking about mindfulness and meditation. His delivery was dry and absolutely hilarious.

I unfortunately didn’t catch any shots of the inside of the theater, but I will leave you with a few shots of the amazing art collaborations that were going on. It was a very inspiring day. And maybe, just maybe, I will get some help remembering whether I actually know that lady from somewhere in my travels.

(Photo credit: Erik Ferguson)

Logo Design , Logos , Print Design , Signage

Outstanding Rebranding!

Back when I was still in school, my friend Erik contacted me to ask if I could do a logo and some signage for a yoga studio (Centered Within Yoga) that also doubled as a karate dojo (Okinawan Traditional Martial Arts).

The reason this project sounded like so much fun is that the people who run the studio are so cool and happy, and they seemed to trust my creative ideas. This can make the hugest difference between a fun project and a not-so-fun one. So, I incorporated the project into a class at school so that I could get credit and also get paid at the same time, which I thought was pretty smart.

We have just finished the exterior signage for both storefronts (the project ended up growing a bit, and that is why it has taken a little longer to complete), and I thought I would share!

The logos both needed a more simplified treatment. For Centered Within Yoga, the client wanted to keep the lotus, but we opted for a san serif typeface that would be easier to read from the street view exterior of the building. Although we didn’t want the logos to be too matchy-matchy, we wanted them to family together a little better.

The updated logos and color palette(s):

The logo treatment was a little trickier with Okinawan, as the yellow crest is a traditional martial arts crest and so to alter it too much would be disrespectful. We opted for a slightly simplified version of the crest (#4 below), and the red and white Okinawan flag for the main logomark.

Here are the final logo treatments we went with, which we chose for their simplicity and optimum street visibility:

Back in March, I provided the client with a photoshop comp of what the exterior signage would look like after completion:

And this is the actual completed project!

It’s really fun for me to look at the before and after.

We branded the heck out of that storefront!

I’m particularly happy with how the decals on the doors and windows turned out.

Then I did the signage for the second location. Although I can’t take credit for the Sage River Wellness logo, I did set up the signage for them (file set up, color palette and production), as well as the decals for the windows that say yoga, massage therapy, counselling and reiki.

This was a very fun project, as I love to see my designs out in the real physical world! I hope to work more with these clients going forward, on their promotional materials (mainly posters and flyers) and their business collateral. They were great people to work with!

This blog entry wouldn’t be complete without a big shout-out to Erik Ferguson, who not only helped me get this job, but acted as a terrific advocate for my creative ideas, and offered tons of second opinions and helpful feedback. Many thanks to you, Erik!!

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