Celebrating Milestones

I was lucky enough to witness two major events in family members' lives this year. First, my boyfriend's sister got married. And second, my dad celebrated his 60th birthday. I was heavily involved in both events mainly because I designed the invitations. I like doing graphic design projects more and more. I usually only do them for personal things, but I would love to start doing actual client work.

This is the front and back of the wedding invitation for my boyfriend's sister's wedding:

I collaborated on this one with my boyfriend. He's an artist as well. I did the text and layout while he did the illustrations. The three ovals in the middle were sticker designs that were printed out and stuck onto the bags of Costa Rican coffee that were given away as souvenirs to all the wedding guests.

And here they are printed out:

Not the best photos, but I just wanted to include this. They look great in person. Roughly 5"x7".

Here are the invites I made for my dad's surprise 60th birthday party:

I did all the artwork and layout on these ones. And here they are printed out with the green envelopes I bought to go with them:

By the way, the surprise was a huge success. My dad is a smart guy but not very observant at times, so it wasn't too difficult to keep all the planning hidden from him. Great times were had by all!

NW Animation Festival

So, I got to work on a stop-motion short for a whole year at the Art Institute of Portland before I graduated a couple months ago. Roles I served on the project include student director, writer, animator, puppet and set fabricator, rigger, and compositor. With the help of about 30 fellow students of mine from the Art Institute of Portland, we created "The Box Game".

I've been submitting the short film to festivals for the past month, including the Northwest Animation Festival happening right here in Portland, Oregon! They accepted our film along with 77 other films from around the country and world. "The Box Game" will be showing on the third day of the festival, this Sunday. Pretty exciting!

Also, we had DVDs made specially for the cast and crew of the film. Complete with commentaries! I designed the DVD case cover and disc art using images from the film. Take a look!