I’ve got a new launch for you today! Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working on my good friend Bethany Owen’s new branding and website. We put the final touches — for now — on the website yesterday, and it is now ready for public consumption.

I had a blast working on this project. It ate my work brain for a few days, and it turns out that’s a great way to work! Lauren may be onto something there. One of the many upsides to working with a friend who actually trusts you is the freedom to experiment, and it was particularly convenient after my new (2013 release, inexpensive and 50% off on Amazon) Bamboo Pad arrived.

The thing about my obsession with hand-written logos (I’ve done a few before, though my clients ended up going with another option) is that my handwriting is terrible. Also, I pick up pens weird. But it’s fun, and it’s great to be able to write straight into Illustrator and use its brushes and play around with it instead of fingerpaint on my tiny phone screen like I used to do. That’s how I drew my blog signature and my own portfolio logo.

Another thing I got to do was suggest Squarespace to Bethany. I’d been wanting to try out that platform for a while; you may have noticed it’s got really popular among designers lately, and I love the look and portfolio functionality of it. I’m absolutely not ready to switch myself, for various reasons, but I can see the appeal. It’s very intuitive, the templates are gorgeous, and you can do certain things — like set up Disqus and Google Analytics, add a slider, lay out a page template, put in a gallery block, or connect a mailing list — with a quick copy/paste in the settings, whereas on WordPress you need a plugin and then some.

It also has a space for custom CSS, though this time I didn’t use it. The standard options turned out a beautiful website, but I’m definitely curious to learn how to change more of it. Still, one of the reasons I love self-hosted WordPress is the control and sheer access you have to the bowels of your site, and I missed that on Squarespace.

But overall, I absolutely see why so many people use it and I’m very happy I decided to offer it as an option in my design packages.

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If you follow me on Twitter, you may have heard me talk about this blog design a time or two. I followed my ideal stream to design it: logo, mockup, graphics, coding, fixes. It’s the first time I’ve dared to design a mockup and hope I’d be able to code it on my own, and I’m really pleasantly surprised and surprisingly pleased with the experience.

The blog in question is a new food blog by London-based Hana Mendes, and it’s called Nirvana Cakery.

She wanted an elegant logo with soft pastels, greens and grays and pale pinks. I had a blast putting this together for her. She provided tons of visuals, and once I saw the blog content she was planning on releasing, everything gelled quite easily. Her photos are gorgeous and I think we ended up with a design that complements her photography style perfectly.

The first logo draft was further from what she’d envisioned, though I love it on its own right and wanted to include it as a discarded concept on the branding guide. It was hand-lettered and left me itching to design a blog for someone who wants that kind of style. But for Hana, I stepped away from the playfulness and went for soft and beautiful, lovely watercolor textures, a lovely serif font for body text and plenty of top border accents in green and pink.

See the full design on my portfolio here, or check out the live site! Would love to know what you think, but if you get distracted by the recipes — especially the chocolate and raspberry vegan cupcakes she just posted; what a way to launch — well, I will understand. ;)

You can find more of my design work on my portfolio, and read about the services I offer here.

Earlier this week, I finished a media kit design for The Drifter, a fashion and travel blog run by amazing photographer Ming Nomchong — seriously, you should check out her Instagram. It is beautiful and it will make you want to hop on a plane to warmer, ocean-adjacent lands stat.

The media kit is inspired by postcards from the beach, and incorporates her existing logo as well as play off the branding on her websites in terms of fonts and colors and vibe. Most of all I wanted her photography to take center stage, so the design itself is fairly clean and simple. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, and it was great working with Ming.

See a larger version on my portfolio.

If you’d like a media kit design, feel free to contact me through my portfolio.