An exciting new project we (me and the wife) are setting up – seeing how our wedding stationary went down a hit, we are going for it! Big Day Print is coming and it will offer amazing and custom wedding design and print. Keep your eyes peeled!!

So, for our wedding, my fiancee and I (she being the boss of course hehe) decided that our wedding stationary must be completely different and as personal to us as possible – I mean, a wedding is a big day and you want to make it as individual as you are. So I urge you to do something completely different to what you see at the wedding fairs: the folded magnetic invitation packs are lovely but are very much like the Ford Model T (you can have any colour you like as long as it’s on cream paper with gold foil lettering). Plus your wallet will be extremely light pricing those bad boys up. Yes, wedding print is expensive, but it can be a whole lot more with foiling a die cutting that is on offer.

To begin with, we started with our theme of our wedding which is something that we both enjoy: movies. We have a massive obsession of curling on the sofa and watching a good movie. So we decided to go on that. One of the earliest concepts for our design was messing around with vectorizing our portraits into modern icons – something that can be repeated over and over like a board that actors stand in front of when they are walking on the red carpet. Here is the finished design that we went with: 

Our colour scheme is navy, aqua and ivory with all of these incorporated into the design. the splash of pink just highlighting the detail in the icons of us…

And this is the back – inverting the colours makes it more striking to look at. But we decided that the actual invite should be more of a statement of intent to the theme – what better way to get the message of a movie themed wedding than to receive an invite in the form of a DVD? We bought some blank empty DVD cases off ebay, and set designing the inserts. First of all, the cover. The cover is tricky to make it look like a proper DVD but to put enough information on to keep the person intrigued – I think we pulled it off incredibly well…

Some of our invitees have mistakenly took these as real DVD’s and they have even been slotted into the DVD shelves – we had to give gentle reminders of the RSVP cards inside them..

So, in conclusion…

Be original in your idea – don’t go for the standard designs that the wedding printers offer. after all, your invites reflect your day!

Sorry that I haven’t posted in a while – I’ve been super busy at work with a new project – designing business cards for our new product range, the colour core business cards. I have to admit, they are very nice. Very nice indeed. Almost makes me wish I had some, they are that good. A good business card is a very nice way of introducing yourself and a gentle reminder of who you are to the person you are giving it to, so a good first and lasting impression is key to that first step of a working relationship. When things have calmed down, I’ll show you the designs I’ve come up with and also a guide to how to design the perfect business card.

But first, here are some more designs I’ve come up with for clients.

As you know (or at least can tell) I created this blog in WordPress – a basically free website platform that has a host of features that help it to stand head and shoulders above the competition – Weebly, Wix and all the rest.

My work colleague Jim Croisdale is also something of a WordPress fan, and he’s recently created a new WordPress website for his guitar tech business Jim’s Guitar Workshop. As with many web platforms, you start with a theme (in this case Sela) and go from there, adding and editing as you go along. For free, you get a domain name (albeit a .wordpress.com one), 3GB of online storage (and you can cheat to get more) and a range of widgets and plugins. Your site can have a custom domain mapped to it for another £11 a year. And the only downside are a few small ads on the blog pages. Hardly a massive shortcoming, especially when people are SO used to seeing ads everywhere now, many of which are massive and a real pain.

Jim’s site is clean and clear, and if you’re viewing it on a mobile phone, tablet, laptop or desktop machine you’ll notice that it’s fully responsive – everything still fits and looks right, regardless of the screen size and orientation. This is important on all websites these days, and the themes on WordPress.com are all of this ilk.

Jim’s gone for a homepage with a fair bit of information about his guitar tech services, as well as his guitar buying/selling and cable manufacture. Of course, the site has a menu structure to access all these pages, but sometimes it’s good to have a few paragraphs on your homepage with easy links to the more popular content. There’s a blog too, where he writes articles about guitar repair, buying and selling, and other general music and music business related stuff.

I don’t think Jim’s site will ever win an award for being pretty, but it’s certainly functional, easy to read and easy to navigate. For a site of its type, it’s certainly among the best I’ve seen. Guitar techs are essentially workshop luddites who’ve discovered electricity, so a half decent site like this one is actually a cut above most of the competition.

If you happen to play the guitar and are having problems, I’d get in touch via his site. He’s a much better guitar tech than he is a web designer.

So I’m making an effort to trim down for suit shopping, the wedding pictures and our holiday – so I decided to batch cook some dinners for work this week. This week, it’s lasagne – packed full of amazing beef mince and vegetables I’ve got from the butcher’s. Just had it, it was glorious and I could’ve quite easily gone home and ate the rest of it.

I’ve even cut out the fizzy drinks too, good ol’ fashioned h2o for this guy. Even resorting to pinching some of Frankies special bath salts to help out some goodness back into me. By the time summer comes, Zac Efron will have nothing on this guy haha

So, in a bid to stop the dogs from using the new carpet in the hallway as their en suite bathroom, I have purchased and erected the extra long, extra tall child gate across the top of the landing. Drilling into the wall and using my toolbox with all the bits and pieces in it for the first time in ages felt good (as you can probably tell, I have no DIY skills whatsoever). Furthermore, I went on to tackle the more pressing issue: fixing my PS4 controller that said canines had chewed the joysticks out of. It worked, but I couldn’t sprint away fast enough from everyone who was killing me on Star Wars Battlefront. Serious problem. So replacing the chewed remains from inside the controller and putting it all back together was, I thought, a great success. So cheesecake is needed. Happy Sunday everyone!

I’m sorry that I haven’t posted much since the disaster that was the sandwich post. Since then, my personal life has exploded with activity – I decided to take on some home improvements. When I say “I”, I really mean companies such as IKEA and SCS and workmen…

The first project that we decided to tackle was the nightmare kitchen. Who knew kitchens would turn out so expensive? After looking at 5 well known kitchen establishments, IKEA was the only logical and financial choice that was viable (WREN wanted to charge me £22,000 for me to paint my own doors!). The 90% of the kitchen that has been installed is amazing, I love it. Grey doors with a near black worktop and silver handles. Its beautiful. I hate to use the term, but it’s vintage with a modern twist. Urgh, that me shiver just using that term (all designers hate when people use that phrase). The walls are a deep green blue hue and it looks magnificent. It has been a nightmare ripping out the old one, ripping out all the flooring, replacing some of the floor boards as they were rotten so bad they were like wet cardboard, painting and installing the new kitchen. Once it is finished, it will be well worth being proud of.

But that’s not all, the hallway has got a lick of paint (which the dogs have chewed the wallpaper off slightly) and the stairs and landing has got a new carpet (which the dogs have completely marked as their territory). Don’t worry though, the carpet cleaner will be coming out this weekend. But the one thing I am most excited about is the new boiler and thermostat. I know, boilers and thermostats are boring. Utterly and mind blowing-ly boring. But this isn’t just any thermostat, I got the Hive.

Yes, look at that beauty. It’s gorgeous. I can control it from the bottom of the stairs, or from my phone, or from my Moto 360. It even knows when I’ve left the house so it boots the heating off. So, if I’m in the pub and I know I’m about to phone for a taxi, I can turn on my heating and the house will be warm for when I get home. Or, if I’m too drunk by that point from the 4 pints I’d have had, the geolocation from my phone will turn it on automatically – that’s right, I don’t even have to do anything. Best thing of all, its already saving me money on my gas and electricity bills – the boiler is the only gas appliance I have in the house now. So screw you gas and electric companies. What a world to be living in.