card – A Smith of All Trades

Graphic Design, Holiday, Valentine's Day

Bruce Springsteen Valentines

February 16, 2015 Jessica Smith

** Nerdy post alert**

My family adores Bruce Springsteen. It’s been ingrained in our personalities since birth that Springsteen is the man. I was listening to The Boss on the way into work the other and had the funny idea to make Springsteen Valentines. You see, Bruce is pretty much the only person who can get away with telling a woman that they are just OK looking, but he loves them anyway. Any other man would get slapped for a comment like that, yet women still swoon over Bruce.

Off the top of my head, I could think of two instances in which Springsteen pulls this line. So I made my step mom and little sister cards with those lyrics:

“You ain’t a beauty, but hey you’re all right.” – Thunder Road

“I just can’t understand it, you’re not pretty at all. But I come when you whisper, I run when you call.” – I wanna be with you

I’m positive there are more examples, but none come to mind just yet.

Anyway, here’s the simple card I made for my Springsteen-loving family members — I’d never give them to anyone else because they would be so offended. But if you love The Boss, you’d love to get these valentines.

Hope you all had a great Valentine’s Day. B made a yummy breakfast and bought me some beautiful flowers. Then we got our favorite pizza for dinner and watched The Interview.

In other news, Brian was concerned Remmy was cold since it is all of 9 degrees in Maryland. So I gave Remmy and old hoodie, which was simultaneously the most adorable and hilarious thing ever.

Remmy_Hoodie3

He wore it all afternoon and slept in it last night. That dog never fails to crack me up.

Graphic Design

Mobile Togs phone cases

July 10, 2014 Jessica Smith

I hinted a few weeks ago that I had an exciting new opportunity/project in the works and yesterday I got the email I’d been waiting for! Four of my graphic designs are being printed onto phone cases for a company called Mobile Togs.

It’s a pretty neat opportunity for me and I am pretty pumped that they reached out to feature my artwork.

We chose four designs. My first choice was my Do What You Love print. So many people have reached out to me to ask about printing this design, so it seemed like a great design to pick.

We also chose my Maryland state love print.

The third print we went with was one of my Adventures with Remmy the Dog. I had to tweak this a bit to make it fit on the phone just right, but it is so flippin’ adorable!

The last design we chose is one that I haven’t even shared with you guys yet! I’ve been working on a whole suite of animal prints for my Etsy shop and decided to choose one of the critters for the phone cases.

The cases are pretty cool. They have a slot to slick your IDs or credit cards, which is awesome for metro riders or students who need to carry their IDs/card everywhere with them. They also have mirrors at the back (that’s why you see the grayed out corner on the cases — that means the designs are printed on the mirrored surface!). You can pick any color with any design, too.

I’m so excited to finally share this on my blog. It’s been tough keeping it a secret 🙂

Graphic Design

Give Thanks printable

November 14, 2012 Jessica Smith

Well, it’s almost Thanksgiving. Holy moly, it is early this year. Thanksgiving is always crazy for us because we travel to Ohio to see my dad’s family. That doesn’t sound too crazy, but when you consider that we go up on Wednesday night and come back Saturday morning and that it is a 9-hour drive… well, you see what I’m talking about. But family is family, so we suck it up and go. And we have a great time 🙂

Today’s post is another graphic design tutorial using screen caps in InDesign. Let’s do this!

I wanted to make a “Give Thanks” printable/computer background for the month of November, so I opened up a new InDesign doc and got to work.

Since Fall has such rich, warm tones, I chose an orange for the background by dragging a box to the edges of the paper and filling it.

I adjusted my orange using the CMYK sliders.

In a second layer, I made this cross-looking design using the font Soft Ornaments Six. This shape is four “letters” rotated and joined together.

I liked this look, so I grouped the four “letters” together, then copied and pasted them into another layer. I rotated them so the cross became a snowflake-y design.

Then I added my words. I put them into one text box at first before I started to manipulate the text.

I found a font I like called Albemarle Swash, so I changed my text to that font and started playing with colors. First purple.

Nope. Then light blue with a brown background…

And then I changed “give” to be smaller and all lowercase, resting it on the upper curl of the “k.”

… and then I got tired of looking at orange. Shocker. I can’t stay away from blue, no matter how hard I try. I also made the document a square instead of a rectangle and changed my text to black.

I like how it turned out, even though the colors have nothing to do with the fall. In the blue, the background looks more like a snowflake, which means I can use this as my background all through the winter.

Feel free to download this printable, and remember to give thanks!

Things I am thankful for:

My husband
My family
My friends
My pup
My job and my awesome coworkers
My new and awesome neighbors
My house. Gosh, I love my house.
My blog and all of my followers!
…. and so many other things.

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