Design Work
« Previous EntriesHandmade Haven is back!
By Marceline | January 29, 2010
Yay! The Glasgow Craft Mafia’s relaxed Sunday afternoon markets return for 2010. We won’t be there every month like last year so get along if you can. I will be there this Sunday with a selection of my wares including perfect Valentine’s Day gifts and cards, and a bargain box! I’m not bringing all my stuff so if you’re coming along and want something in particular let me know so I can make sure to bring it!
I did the flyer too, using Chloe from Kuro-e’s lovely illustration. There’s some more of my recent design work on my portfolio site.
Topics: Design Work, Events | No Comments »
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New Homepage!
By Marceline | November 1, 2009
I’ve just done a long-needed redesign of the homepage. It’s always been a problem for me as it has to do so many things – a visitor could be a customer, or a shop/gallery owner or a journalist so how best to appeal to everyone and get them to the right information?
Hopefully, this is a decent solution – there’s more focus on the products, pointing people to either the shop or my image gallery and then the lower part has all the info and blog news plus highlighting the various social networking/marketplaces I’m involved with. Hope you like it!
While we’re on the design theme, you might want to check out my portfolio site. I’ve finished a few jobs recently including a lovely site for fellow Mafioso pumpkinsputnik and these little icons for Folksy. Lots more to come soon too – you wouldn’t believe how many half-finished projects I am involved in just now. Some websites really do take ages to launch.
Topics: Design Work | No Comments »
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Fruity Progression
By Marceline | May 17, 2009
The cutie fruity friends (yes, that is going to be their name) are progressing from their sketchbook doodles! These are the four that ended up working best and will soon be a badge set. I hope I picked your favourite – mine is definitely the happy orange though I also love how the watermelon looks like she is nervously freaking out.
To get to this point, I basically just scan the drawings, take them into Photoshop and fiddle about with Levels and things until the lines are nice and clear. Then I tidy up any messy bits and colour them in. I like to colour in a watercolour wash kinda way so I don’t worry too much about being neat. I also have the super-steady mouse hand of someone who has spent about ten years laboriously photoshopping images for the web. Once that’s done, they’re ready for my badge templates which I have set up in Illustrator ready for printing.
Later on I will redraw all the characters in Illustrator for other stationery items. I love the sketchy charm of the originals but the lines are generally too rough to be used for anything bigger than a badge. You can see this with Cakeify above. Sketch on the left and redrawn on the right. I’ve lost a little of the character of the original but it’s also much neater and clearer.
Now comes the tedious part of cutting out circles and making and packaging the badges. Hopefully I will be back very soon with the finished badges!
PS. Surprised at the love for Cactus Bear in the last post comments. He was a total joke doodle but who knows what may become of him now?
Topics: Design Work, New Work | 3 Comments »
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Catching Up
By Marceline | January 28, 2009
I hate it when I’m too busy to blog! Here, then, are some random bits of news.
New Stuff!
I have been working away like mad behind the scenes and have a few new products to launch in the next few days. I’ve already added some new Super Cute Kawaii sticker tags to the shop so you can cute up your gifts. The Christmas ones were super popular but gift tags shouldn’t just be for Christmas. Thus these ones will do you for any occasion and are in a smaller pack of 6 at a much cheaper price!
Press Page
I have finally updated my Press page, with all the more recent interviews and features I’ve had. The newest one is above – Patty from Little Red Suitcase asked me some very interesting questions and the results are online now. Thanks Patty!
Mama’s Little Babies
This is a new shop I designed for Mama’s Little Babies, run by Cheri who makes lovely vintage inspired jewellery. I think it looks fabulous so do go and have a look. It’s based on my Prettify theme. Speaking of Prettify, there are now some tutorials there on how to change the banner and colours should you wish to tinker with it yourself.
Oh noes!
Shopify finally gave us customisable 404 error pages and I have been havng LOTS of fun with it. Grumpy Cakeify is made for the job. It is actually very useful as well -take a look if you like.
DaWanda
Yep, our European friends can now purchase some of my wares via my brand new DaWanda shop. Since a large proportion of my family is Dutch, it makes sense to have somewhere that people can buy in Euros. Hopefully they will spread the word! More on this soon, as it’s very very new.
Topics: Design Work, Me Me Me, New Work, Shop Spotlight | No Comments »
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Desk Calendar
By Marceline | January 23, 2009
Look what I made! A bunny and panda desk calendar! Whenever people ask what the downsides of working at home are, I can never think of anything. Today I realised one of them – having no idea what day it is. I’m still convinced it’s Saturday today, despite my laptop having Friday displayed at the top of the screen. I usually rely on my desk calendar but I didn’t get one this year – sob! With the end of January almost upon us, clearly the only thing to do was make my own.
My old desk calendar was bought in Tokyo and is of the CD jewel case folded over variety, but a bit smaller. I just measured the pieces of card and drew up a grid in Illustrator, then tediously added in the correct numbers for each month. Then I printed it on to card, cut it out and hurrah! Here it is in real life (excuse the dark photo).
Sad life of a freelancer – the only thing worth noting this month is doing my tax return. This is the top of my shelving unit right beside where I work. You can see here some of my tins, a plastic cookies cup that I keep pens in, my cute notebook from Rebecca that I am trying to make myself use, and a corner of one of my lovely tiles by Campbell Firth.
March is my favourite month as both me and Panda have our birthdays then. The only thing to do was add a tiny bunny and panda on the right days!
If anyone else is short of a desk calendar, I could probably enlarge this a little bit for CD size and give you a PDF. Email me!
Topics: Design Work, Guides and Tutorials | 5 Comments »
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Prettify Shop Winner!
By Marceline | January 21, 2009
Back in December, I announced the winner of the Prettify competition as Red Panda Chainmaille. Well, the shop redesign is now complete!
I had a great time working on this site. Jessica was full of ideas and had a clear idea of what she wanted. The general layout is hardly any different from Prettify but with the Red Panda branding and colours making it her own.
There are a few custom features that I added from Jessica’s ideas. First is the Sold Items section, which displays all the products that aren’t currently in stock. She also nudged me into creating some code so that the sold products have an enquiry button instead of a useless buy button. This was such a great idea, I promptly added it to my own shop.
Here’s what Jessica had to say:
“Marceline was great to work with! I supplied my logo, font, and colors, and Marceline made it happen. I feel that my website now looks very professional, and most importantly, it’s suited to me! She was always very friendly and got all requested changes done in a very timely manner. Highly recommended.”
Do have a look around the Red Panda shop and marvel at the intricate work in this type of jewellery. It really proves my point about my concept for Prettify, that what handmade designers need is BIG PHOTOS to show off the detail of our work.
If you like what you see, then you can get yourself a very similar design free by applying Prettify to your Shopify shop. And if you need any customisation, you know where I am.
I’ve also started a Shopify Tips & Tutorials blog on the Prettify example site – there are already step by step tutorials on how to change the banner and avatar images and I’ll be adding more very soon.
Thanks again to everyone who entered, and hoping Jessica has a successful shop!
Topics: Design Work | No Comments »
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Petit à Porter
By Marceline | January 10, 2009
One of the freelance projects I finished this week was some graphics for cute crafter Petit à Porter. Mariví currently sells on Dawanda and is working on her own ecommerce site. She asked me to create a logo, banners, icons, buttons etc. that she can use around the web.
She was after something French and cute to match her sweet creations of jewellery and accessories and this is what we came up with.
Banner image
Shop icons
Business card template
It was a fun little project just to do the graphics and not all the coding as well. I think it all looks lovely and can’t wait to see the finished shop.
As always, you too can hire me for both big jobs and little jobs – see www.marcelinesmith.com
Topics: Design Work | No Comments »
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More on Prettify, and a competition!
By Marceline | November 6, 2008
As I mentioned yesterday, the theme I designed for Shopify has now been released. If you use Shopify you can go to the Themes area in your Admin Panel and use it for your shop.
The idea behind it was to create a theme that would be perfect for artists and crafters, especially those who are used to sites such as Etsy, Folksy and Dawanda. I spent a lot of time on those sites comparing the layouts and design and merged the best parts together to make Prettify.
It has a similar clean look to all those sites, and the design is built around banner and avatar images that can be swapped for your own design without too much difficulty. The emphasis is on large product photos to show off intricate details and unique handmade products. A lot of the other Shopify themes give much more emphasis to product descriptions and prices but for most art and craft products, it’s the pictures that are most important.
There are four colour versions available, as you can see above, and these can be switched easily in the Theme Editor. Of course, you can also edit the stylesheets to use your own colour scheme and build additional features on top of my code. That’s the beauty of Shopify.
I’ve built an example site using Prettify so you can have a browse around and see how all the pages look. I’ll be adding more features in the coming weeks and will explain how some of them are done.
And now for the competition! I’m giving away a FREE Shopify theme design based on Prettify. I’ll edit the images and colours to match your current branding, or come up with something new for you. I’ll add some extra features that you might need and help you get everything set up. The only catch is that you need to have a Shopify account on at least Basic level which does incur a monthly fee. If you’re serious about your business though, it’s an excellent investment. I’m literally 100% happy with my Shopify shop.
If you want to enter, just email hello AT askingfortrouble.org with a link to your current shop or website and why you need a new design. I’m keeping this open until December 1st so you’ve got plenty time to enter. You could have a brand new shop for the new year!
UPDATE: This competition is now closed. I’ll be picking a winner very soon and will contact everyone who entered.
Topics: Design Work, News | No Comments »
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Prettify (and a bunny with mittens)
By Marceline | November 5, 2008
Gosh, that exciting bit of news I promised aaaages ago finally arrives and I am not prepared. AND America did the right thing! An exciting morning for sure.
A while back, I was asked by the lovely folks at Shopify to design a theme for everyone to use. I, of course, jumped at the chance and created a theme called Prettify which has four different colour versions, and a bunny! It’s now been released so if you use Shopify you can go to the Themes area in your Admin Panel and use it for your shop! If you don’t have Shopify, you can see it in action at prettify.myshopify.com.
I’ll be writing more about Prettify very soon and there will be a competition too, woo!
As promised, here is a bunny who hasn’t lost her gloves. Bunny and Panda from Super Cute Kawaii have been hit with a sudden snow fall and know just how to wrap up warm. These cute sticker tags are in the shop right now so you too can cute up your Christmas gifts.
Okay, I need a lie down now.
Topics: Design Work, New Work, News | No Comments »
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Bedcrumb Boutique
By Marceline | August 19, 2008
I’m delighted to finally be able to show you one of the things I’ve been working on recently. This is the lovely new online shop for bedcrumb, a range of self indulgent home accessories by Heidi Cannon.
Heidi has a lovely illustration style so this hardly felt like work, bringing her drawings and ideas to life. In keeping with the pretty, layered style of her products, the shop has a collage design and feels more like leafing through an elegant scrapbook than browsing a web shop.
It’s built using Shopify, which still never ceases to amaze me as to what it can be coaxed into doing. I learned a lot more about coding for Shopify doing this project and finally found a way to make a pretty search page, which pleases me no end.
Anyway, do go to www.bedcrumb.co.uk and have a browse around – the product shots all have little illustrated frames and the information pages all have lovely backgrounds drawn by Heidi.
If you’re interested in hiring me as a web designer, you can have a look at all my information and portfolio at www.marcelinesmith.com
Also, if you’re an artist, designer or crafter with a clear visual style and lots of ideas, I’m on the lookout for people to collaborate with on web design and ecommerce projects. This could mean you get a new site or shop for a fraction of the going price, or even in return for a trade. Email me to discuss!
Here’s some more images from the shop:
‘Betsie’ cushion collection page
About page
Topics: Design Work | No Comments »
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