Christmas Cards 2014

As you may have realised from my previous blog post, I have been crafting my own Christmas cards this year – although, to be honest, I do most years. But this year I have done something a little different. I made my cards by carving a small Christmas tree design (a bit smaller than A6) into a piece of lino and printing onto various papers in black ink. So the paper shows through where the design is rather than the blank ink.

Red paper, brown paper, Japanese newspaper

Shiny gold paper, crinkly white paper

I have only written 4 so far, this is the rest…

These cards were inspired by the linocutting workshop I took part in at work, back in November (see the blog post here!). I even re-printed my wintery tree design, that I created at that workshop, to have a more limited edition and larger (A5) card. Not that these cards are actually for sale at all anyway.

Red and gold

This isn’t the only Christmas card I’ve worked on this year. I also contributed to the emc design ‘12 days of Christmas’ card – read the emc blog here – with nine ladies dancing. Although this was digitally created, not handmade.

An emc blogger

Last week I wrote a blog for emc design, which was published this morning – not as an April Fools’ joke! It is on the subject of keyboard shortcuts and you can have a gander at it over here. I’m hoping to do some more blogs for emc as I really enjoy the writing and publishing of my own words and opinions. Which is something that I hope I vaguely get across here on my own blog with my somewhat sporadic posts, although they do tend to be more visually orientated. I am a graphic designer after all and by no means an eloquent writer (not to mention that I spelt ‘eloquent’ incorrectly the first time).

I am planning on re-versioning and updating my university dissertation for a future emc blog. I feel some of the subject matter is very relevant to the ELT (English Language Teaching) industry – which is what we predominantly work in. If you can’t remember or, probably more likely that you, don’t know what my dissertation topic was – it was over two years ago:

Transport, tourism and cross-cultural signage
How an increase in world transport and tourism has created a greater demand for concise cross-cultural signage: The boundaries and relationship between language, culture, visual communication and navigation.

You can read the original here on Issuu if you fancy it or simply wait for the time when I’ve written the new [shorter] version for the emc blog. I think it will also be appropriate for me to write some kind of post-Japan blog for emc, considering language differences etc. Watch this space… or more importantly, the emc blog space. And Twitter too.

Castles & Windmills

I wrote my first blog for emc design; about getting inspiration from the outside world and comparing Falmouth (the castle) and Stevington (the windmill).

Read it here.

I’ve got a job!

A real job. That isn’t based in a supermarket.

I am now a Junior Designer at emc design in Stevington, just outside of Bedford, who specialise in books for education. I was on a 6 week temporary contract, which started at the end of September, but after 3 weeks I seem to have done well enough for them to offer me a permanent position.

Exciting!