Posts tagged ‘behind-the-scenes’
So December 2011 popped up suddenly and unexpectedly last year, arriving way earlier than I anticipated. I quickly found myself envious of these fancy designers I saw who had the time and resources to create beautiful holiday cards to send to their clients and prospective clients. I really wanted to do something similar, but I had way too many commitments to allow me the time to make something worthwhile. December passed in a flurry and I lamented my inability to get this simple task done.
By the time I got myself some vacation, it was the week of Christmas, at which point sending holiday cards is just embarrassing. In this downtime, though, I realized that what I really wanted to say in my holiday cards had nothing to do with Christmas, Hannukah, etc. What I wanted to do say to all my clients was thank you for their business and for allowing me to represent their brand. I have some great clients, and it’s because of them that I had a successful first full year as a professional freelancer. The appropriate holiday for that kind of retrospection, I decided, was actually New Years, and I totally had time to send cards for New Years!
By this point, however, I didn’t have the time or resources to create something big and fancy. What I did have lying around, however, was some leftover cardstock from when I published my own comics years and years (and years) ago. It’s a card stock that resembles cheap brown paper, a reference to the grab bag in my company name. And it’s legal size card stock, because I liked books that were 7″x8.5″. Have you ever tried to find legal size card stock? Good luck. And to find it in any kind of non-white color or pattern? It doesn’t exist. This stash I had special ordered from a paper supplier back in Georgia and had them cut it to legal size for me.
So I sat down and planned the card you see here, half a legal sheet (4.25″x14″), giving it two folds so that it not only had a fun reveal and plenty of space to write on, but would fit snugly into a standard 4 3/8″ x 5 3/4″ invitation envelope. I printed a batch of them on my home printer, hand-folded them, and wrote each of my clients a person note on the inside. I sent them all out just before New Year’s Eve. Since then, I’ve received nothing but smiles and reciprocated thank yous from the cards, proving that the whole enterprise was a success. The best part: I still have several sheets of the card stock left, and with a few tweaks of the art, I can whip up a non-holiday thank you note if I need one in a pinch.
The end of the year has arrived, disturbingly faster than I had planned for, but it’s here nonetheless. This is the time of year when everybody is into lists—the top five whatevers of 2011, your 10 best events of the year, eight things that will be awesome in 2012—and let’s not even get started about resolutions.
So it’s in this spirit that I share with you a little app that has been a lifesaver for me since becoming a freelancer and having to juggle a jumble of clients, projects, and business housekeeping tasks all at once. It’s called ToDoist.
I started innocently enough with a To Do list. In the early days, when I was still transitioning from a day job to my current lifestyle, I would keep a list of tasks and goals on a dry erase board. It was tangible, easy to update, and always just out of sight enough to forget about. Great as long as I never left my work space.
When I started visiting client offices more and more, I needed something portable. Enter the Field Notes notebook: 48 pages of grided paper small enough to fit into my pocket. I could assign each day it’s own page, make a list, add to it as the day went on, and always check back on previous days for what didn’t get done. Again, tangible and easy, and now portable too! Perfect for misplacing or forgetting at home. Plus, when you flip a few pages, those ongoing tasks from several days ago are out of sight and out of mind. Blissful ignorance!
This is the final poster I created for the Remy Bumppo Theatre Company 2011/2012 Season, and in many ways the easiest of all three. (Note, I’ve included the black border around the image as a reference for the image size, but it will not appear in the final artwork.)
Chesapeake is a lovely one-man play that practically hands you a buffet of metaphor and imagery to pull from. Briefly, it is the story of a performance artist who is maligned in the press by a conservative senator, who is attacking the artist and his work in order to look good in his re-election campaign. The senator’s plans are to abolish all public funding for the arts. To get even, the artist kidnaps the senator’s favorite dog, a Chesapeake Bay Retreiver, intending to train it to be his own dog, but he ends up getting into an accident (involving water) and dying. When he wakes up, he IS the dog, and goes about trying to manipulate the senator into NOT defunding the arts. The story is full of reincarnation, religious imagery, ethical considerations, politics, art, and even real heart. As I said, it’s a great play.
Next up, I’ve got the second poster I created for Remy Bumppo Theatre Company‘s 2011/2012 Season. The first one was Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra, but now we move on to the mid-season holiday-times comedy Changes of Heart by Pierre de Marivaux, a French playwright from the early 1700s. This one wasn’t nearly so difficult as Electra, but it had it’s challenges nonetheless.
The story of Changes of Heart is basically that a prince disguises himself has a lower-class guy, and while exploring the city, meets and falls in love with a woman from the lower-class. He decides to have her kidnapped and brought to the castle, but then cannot find a good way to introduce himself as the prince, so continues the charade. Meanwhile, the man that the prince’s love is engaged to comes looking for her. It’s a comedy of disguises and love across class boundaries, but a comedy along the lines of The Merchant of Venice, where some bits are left a little uncomfortable at the end. Remy Bumppo’s production will be set in Chicago in the 1960s and highlight the class differences by also making them racial differences between the city’s mostly-white north side and mostly-black south side.
Here’s the first of the show designs I created for Remy Bumppo Theatre Company‘s 2011/2012 Season, Mourning Becomes Electra. It was also the most difficult and time consuming.
Why? Well the main reason is the play itself. It is a loose adaptation of the Greek story of the Oresteia. It takes place in New England immediately after the Civil War and follows the Mannan family. It has Freudian overtones in that the main character, Lavinia, harbors an Electra complex, which is the female version of an Oedipal complex: she wants to supplant her mother and be the object of her father’s love. The irony is that, after lots of bloodshed, she really does become her mother in look and demeanor. So my task was to find a central image that captured many of these themes: two women struggling for the same position in the family, usurpation, the female sensibility overcoming the male within the family, the younger generation taking over from the older, jealousy, the cyclical nature of fate. Oh, and the play contains no real overt imagery, metaphorical or otherwise, except the green dress that both women end up wearing and the greek pillars of the Mannan house, the latter of which I was told not to use because we didn’t want people to think this was a Greek play. Oy!
