During the past months I have created several new designs for birthday cards. This time, I mainly played around with the shape(s) that I randomly distribute over the card. In one of the designs, the basic shape is a beer bottle, in typical beer bottle colors. For another design, I started experimenting with the use of letters instead of shapes; but still with randomized locations, colors, rotations and sizes.
Personal greeting cards
Following-up on several of last years’ designs, I continued making more personalized greeting cards. First, I made one for my mother’s 70th birthday, based on butterfly-like shapes. Another one is based on the facade of the former US embassy in The Hague, for a good friend who is into architecture.
Bi-directional patterns
Inspired by the restaurent wall decoration of the Marriott hotel in Villahermosa, I started playing around with patterns that look the same in both the horizontal and vertical directions of the design. These bi-directional patterns can be made using various base shapes, such as diamonds, pentagons and squares. For the colors, I used my all-time favourit purple, and also tried another color scheme using yellow and turquoise.
Christmas card
For this year's Christmas card, I used randomized circlikes to form a text message (in Dutch). The base colors of the circlikes are red and green, placed on a white background: typical Christmas colors. With a little bit of imagination, the words even form a Christmas tree shape! I did some experimentation by making the star yellow instead of red and green, by using single colors for the letters, and by changing the filling of the outer border. For the final design I decided to keep mixed red and green as the only colors and to use a full colored border.
Personalized gifts
During the past few months, I’ve started using my graphic designs to make personalized gifts for my family and friends. First, I made a greetings card for friends who recently got a baby girl. Using pink randomized circlikes, I created a design with a personal message for them.
For one of my sisters, I designed a personalized print for a Dopper drink bottle. Because the print goes all around the bottle, you cannot be sure how the two ends of the design exactly meet when printed: do they match perfectly, is there a gap in between, or do they overlap? To render the design invariant to this uncertainty, I used horizontal lines as basis. Towards the middle of the design, the lines become more and more randomly rotated. If you look closely, you can discover my sister’s name in there: truly personalized!