The Pin hop story

A whole bunch of my surface pattern design friends are getting together for the first ever Pattern Design pin hop, starting this Saturday 15th June... sounds cool right? I wish I could've taken part!

So here's the story...

Last January a group of designers got together and created a pattern design blog hop, which turned out a great success!  But looking through more than 50 separate designers blogs took ages!

So, after that weekend they started a serious discussion: How to keep the idea and creative input of a blog hop, but make it easier to pick and mix and find just your favorites? The answer was, of course, Pinterest!

Where else can the visitor get a quick overlook and  pick out exactly want they want to see, without going through every link in a chain? And all designs are clickable, taking the visitor directly to the designers blog, to see the whole portfolio. On pinterest you can also make comments, share, like, and save to your own favorites. Perfect for all visual artists!

So here it is, the first ever Pattern design Pin hop! 

On Saturday, June 15, close to 50 designers will pin their best interpretations of 4 different themes from an A/W 13-14 brief (by Patternbank) to this unique board! To see the complete work by any designer that catches your eye, just click on the image!

This board is hosted by Find New Designers, a fast growing directory of independent professional print and pattern designers, found on the website findnewdesigners.com (another great opportunity to find talented pattern designers)

This pin hop is organized by Tina Olsson, who sells her design under the name FYLLAYTA.

The link to the Pin Hop board is here.

The Art of Typography - taster!

With just under 2 weeks to go until my online course The Art of Typography kicks off I thought I'd share a little taster of the course with you.

In the fourth unit - Creating your own typeface, we look at a variety of ways of designing your own typefaces from digital apps to hand drawn to using mixed media. But firstly I encourage the students to really understand letterforms and their structure - from stroke widths, weights, x-heights and style. A great way to start doing this is by 'copying' existing letters. I should say copying in design is not something I encourage in anyway share or form but this is slightly different!

So start by either printing out this alphabet sheet that uses a variety of typefaces or simply try drawing them by eye. 

Once you start really looking and taking the time to analyse letters you'll start understanding them more.

Above are some of my sketches. Don't worry if yours aren't quite so neat, this isn't a competition to see who can draw the neatest letters! Try to see shapes within the letters and how the stroke widths relate to different parts. Make any extra sketches to help you do this like I've done on the 'n' and 'v'

In the course we then go on to create our very own letters and typefaces. To find out more information on the course please follow this link. And if you think you'd like to enrol use discount code ALPHA for 15% off. The course will be online forever from the 14th June and I'll be giving feedback during the first 3 weeks of it's launch. Hope you can join in the fun!