My Little Phelpers » graphic design

Turning Hearts to the Fathers

katie — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 00:40:05 +0000

And he shall turn the heart of the fathers to the children, and the heart of the children to their fathers…

Malachi 4:6

I love the idea of having a family tree in the home to always remember the wonderful heritage we come from. However, I don’t really like how family trees often look.

Then one day, I came across this cute shop: My Tree and Me and I fell in love. I loved their modern take on the family tree and wanted to do something like it (but not pay $120).

So I decided to make one of my own. Originally, I had thought that I was just stealing the idea straight from them (I saw the site, forgot to bookmark it, made one of my own, then found the site again), but it turned out that my idea was different that the specific trees they sell.

Here it is:

I love love love the way it turned out. I found a frame at Ikea that is 20×20 so I just need to get this printed and it will be a great addition to my living room. (I thought it was a little bit weird to post the first and last names of all my family on an open blog … I try to be safe about what I put up here … so I changed out the names for this post, but in the real tree it has all the first, middle and last names for James’ five generations.)

I toyed around with the idea of including more information like birth and death dates for each person (as applicable) but decided not to for right now. I just love how clean and simple it is. Maybe in the future I’ll expand it a little bit more, but for now I am very happy.

Now I just have to come up with another idea for baby #2. (who still doesn’t have a name. Guess we shouldn’t have used up all our grandpa names with james…)

Some People are so Creative

katie — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 14:30:24 +0000

This is a creative advertising campaign:

http://www.youtube.com/tippexperience

Typographically Speaking…

katie — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 02:52:55 +0000

While we were in Nashville, we went to the Country Music Hall of Fame. I can’t say that I’m much of a Country Music fan (I actually didn’t know any of the names in that place except if they were in “Walk the Line”), but I actually loved it! LOVED IT! Typographically speaking, it was amazing. Everything there was so cool from a graphic design point of view. I could have spent hours and hours there looking at all the things. I tried to take some pictures of all the cool things, but it was kind of hard because we couldn’t use our flash. Here’s some great things I found:

It was really fun. Sorry the pictures aren’t that great. It was a great exploration of different uses of type to create the same overall look and theme. It was amazing how everything was different, but it all flowed together so well. If you like graphic design or typography or even architecture you should definitely visit the Country Music Hall of Fame.

exciting stuff

katie — Thu, 15 May 2008 02:21:30 +0000

Last weekend for Mother’s Day, I decided that I wanted to finish decorating my living room. The last couple of weeks, I have been putting up some pictures from our wedding and a BEAUTIFUL picture of Christ that Bryan bought me for my birthday. The only thing left was a focal point above the couch. (the Cardon’s next door have this great picture above their couch that I’m totally jealous of, so I needed to find something that would look almost as cute) So, a few weeks earlier, we went to IKEA and found this really cool mirror, and after looking around at a couple of other places, it was the best deal and would look the best — so we went and bought it. After we bought it, we brought it home and my handsome handsome husband and Jordan moved the couch out of the way and went all “handy men” on Kinsale and I and put it up on the wall. They found the stud, drilled a hole, and measured where the other hole needed to be (only one inch away from the other stud) and put the screws in (surprisingly, it’s really sturdy too). I was really impressed and I think it really ended up looking great. What do you think?

Another exciting thing:

The last couple of days at work, I have been creating a special VIP invitation to an event we are putting on for the President of our company and a couple of other important people. I was talking about the invitation with some of the other designers and we came up with the idea to do a pop up card to invite them. So with Andrea’s help we came up with some options. We had some big plans for out of control mountains popping up out of the card, but we took a little different route. So today, I finished it and I think it turned out really cool. We only need to make five. We cut out all the parts today and will put the cards together tomorrow. I’m pretty impressed and was very pleased with the final results. (the pictures aren’t the best… sorry)