About six months ago, I took a lettering workshop with the Friends of Type at Typecon, picked up a few crucial tips, and made my first Illustrator vector piece. After that, I made a commitment to master Illustrator, or perish in the process. I decided to convert the dozens of files I had for the board game I was designing, Co-opoly, from InDesign to Illustrator.  I’m excited about the new directions Illustrator is taking my work, and thrilled to be learning new techniques and tricks every day.

This Halloween, I thought the best way to truly channel Illustrator was to BECOME Illustrator. I chose to embody Illustrator as a superhero, since my motto is “Saving good causes from bad design.”

Making the logo, pen tool, and arrows: first I made paper templates to cut out, and then traced them on to felt.

Making the tool bars: I used t-shirt iron-on transfer paper, available at any craft store. I enlarged and printed out the toolbars, and ironed them on to white fabric. I’m always impressed by the quality of this stuff! Peel off immediately after ironing for a matte finish, a few minutes after it cools for a glossy finish.

Making the mask & cape: I was excited to find the perfect silky fabric in just the right shade of Illustrator goldenrod! I’ve made capes before for other costumes and followed the same pattern – cutting out a large rectangle and rounding the corners, then cutting a neck hole, and attaching it with velcro. I’ve made paper-mache masks before, but I can’t really wear my glasses with a paper-mache mask, and I don’t have contacts. I realized a fabric mask was the simplest way to make a mask that I could wear with my glasses.

The edges of the fabric threatened to fray a lot, and I was too lazy to sew edging around all of it, so I just used black masking tape on the edges – and it worked well to stop the fraying, and looks awesome!

The final costume:

Yeah, I pretty much wear it all the time. It definitely helps me mentally connect to Illustrator.

Click to see it bigger

Hand lettering design made at the Friends of Type workshop at TypeCon 2011.

Original doodles and sketches

Scan of final sketch

Many bezier curves and headaches later...

The finished image!!

I probably could have spent another month tweaking it, but I decided it was time to call it good and move on.

Thanks Friends of Type! I’m so excited to do more lettering projects…

Lots of cool signs everywhere

Yesterday I went to a hands-on CSS workshop with Marcin Wichary of Google and learned some great new web tricks.  Today I went to the Friends of Type workshop and learned some awesome hand lettering tips and processes.  I’m going to refine my design over the next few days, but I’ll post it here when it’s finished!

Some of my sketches from the workshop

Aaron and Erik, the Friends of Type

Well, I decided it was finally time for the yearly update of my website! I’m going to TypeCon in New Orleans this week, and expect to be doing a lot of networking with designer-types, so I figured I’d better make my website reflect what I’m up to now.

I not only redesigned the look of my website, but did a refresh of my portfolio too.  All the projects featured are from the past year, with the exception of my animation reel and some photography.

I’ve definitely grown by leaps and bounds in web design, from my first lame portfolio on googlepages, to wordpress, to indexhibit, to more advanced customizations of wordpress.  The fonts used on my website are Lobster Two and Mako, available through the Google webfonts API.

Those of you who have seen previous versions of my websites, what do you think of the latest?

I have a totally awesome job as the Creative Director (admittedly, I’m the whole creative department) at CommunicateHealth.  So I’m not eager for more freelance work right now, but for the right project or right amount of $, I’m definitely willing to talk.

-Molly