STUDIO - Casual Fridays Paper

Casual Fridays Paper

Casual Fridays designs gift wrap featuring fresh patterns and fun message stickers

to personalise your gift. The unique patterns are handmade and printed in bright colours, with each package featuring a range of consistent stickers.

They also design their products with an eye to sustainability, using 100% recycled paper. Although I am not the most eco-friendly person in terms of my own practice, I feel that it can only ever be a positive aspect if a studio has these values. 

I feel like studios like this are much more appropriate to my current practice now, rather than the type of work I was exploring during my placement. 

STUDIO - Lamplighter London

Lamplighter London

I recently stumbled upon this studio whilst researching for my Design Context publication. They are evidently based in London and create beautiful hand crafted designs that display a brand narrative, using suitable items to build up an overall setting. This is the type of design that I have become really interested in in the past few months, and I feel that my interests are starting to sway more towards personalised stationery and hand crafted gifts and greetings products. I am going to get in touch with the studio, purely to ask a few questions, in order to gain a better understanding of who they are. Unfortunately, London is not somewhere I want to be based myself, however it will be beneficial to my practice to get in touch.

"Lamplighter London design studio provide a variety of creative services, from bespoke artwork pieces to hand drawn maps, calligraphy, branding and social stationery.  We offer unique, fresh designs combining hand drawn elements and artistic, opulent finishing touches, for our stylish, discerning and celebrity clientele. 

Founder Chiara Lisa is an illustrator and graphic designer by trade, and a self-taught calligrapher, specialising in modern and decorative styles. Working in the design industry for 7 years, saw an ongoing demand for creative and unique invitations requests, and in 2012 Lamplighter London was born. In these short years we have had the pleasure of working with many brides, event planners, private and corporate clients across fashion, cultural and media industries. 

Our  name stems from a dearly cherished poetry book by Robert Louis Stevenson, 'A Child's Garden of Verses'. There is a Dickensian history of the lamplighter as a symbolic light-bringer, which we hope to match by bringing happiness and light to our clients."  

STUDIOS -

Wendy Addison

"About twenty years ago I was searching for a more magical life for myself, and it all started with those three words. I thought that my days should be a theatre for my dreams, and it became my life, my home, and a shop!

I describe Port Costa as a Victorian ghost town on the waterfront of north San Francisco Bay. It's tucked away in a very private valley, only twenty minutes from the Bay Bridge. Only two hundred people live here and the downtown consists of five un-restored antique buildings from the 1880's. At one time it was a major shipping port in California, but times changed and left it behind. It's a beautiful relic of the past that is a perfect setting for my little dream life.

As far as creating my own, I love to play around with antique pens and penpoints to get an authentic, slightly irregular look. I love creating letters that are full of character and curlicues! I also like the old-style type that was used in commercial applications in the 1800's—the way they mixed it up using multiple bold and ornamental typefaces together.

Glass glitter has a crystalline reflectiveness that's incomparable. It's made with only two materials: glass and sterling silver. Each tiny shard of glass is a different ‘broken’ shape which adds to the old-style look of it. And I love the way the color changes over time to a bronzy silver; it makes it look even more antique!"

http://www.bhldn.com/b%2Dinspired%2Ddesigners/wendy%2Din%2Dwonderland

STUDIO - Sugar Paper

Sugar Paper Studio

"Sugar Paper is more than luxurious stationery. It is a statement about one's individual style."
CHELSEA SHUKOV AND JAMIE GROBECKER, CO-FOUNDERS

Connoisseurs of correspondence and self-proclaimed traditionalists, Chelsea Shukov and Jamie Grobecker believe that personal stationery makes a deep, lasting impression. These close friends and graphic designers founded Sugar Paper in 2003 after falling in love with the simplicity and nostalgia of letterpress printing. Their mission was simple: to design exquisite social stationery that would be a distinctive stamp of style for their chic clientele, and shine a spotlight on a beautiful and underappreciated art form.

Today, Sugar Paper is renowned for its design aesthetic, unparalleled taste and perfectionism. Having been featured in publications including Martha Stewart Weddings, VOGUE, InStyle, Lucky, Vanity Fair and Domino, Sugar Paper is a trusted resource for their upscale, stylish and celebrity clientele.

Studio Environment -

Portfolio -

EMILY MCDOWELL INC - illustrator

Emily McDowell

"After spending nearly a decade working as an advertising art director, writer and creative director, I decided to quit my fulltime agency job at the beginning of 2011, in order to start making more things that weren’t ads. At the time, I wasn’t sure what those things would be, but I knew I needed to try to figure it out.

I took some wise person’s advice, and started with going back to what I most loved to do as a kid. For me, that was drawing — specifically, lettering — and writing stories. I began to put my drawings up on a posterous blog and share them on my personal facebook page as a way to keep me motivated, and people started to ask if they could buy them. (I was as surprised as anyone.) So I made an etsy shop to sell my illustrated prints.

The shop grew, and I made this website, and I started doing commissioned illustration work in between freelance advertising jobs. I’d always wanted to have a card line, but I’d successfully talked myself out of it until January 2013, when I decided to do an experiment. I had 100 copies of one Valentine card printed that I’d written, based on what I felt was a universal experience all of us have had at one point in our lives. I put it in my etsy shop, not knowing what would happen, figuring I’d sell a few. Etsy put it on their Facebook page, and I hate using the phrase “went viral,” but it went viral. I shipped over 1,600 individual copies of that card to customers in 8 days, turned my house into a Kinko’s, put the 8-year-old to work in ways that certainly violated several child labor laws, and came out of the experience with the decision to create my own line.

I launched my line of 45 cards at the National Stationery Show in May 2013, and every day since has been an adventure. An amazing, crazy, learning-curve-tastic adventure. And I have a feeling things are just getting started.

There’s a reason why I’m sharing this whole long story with whoever’s read this far: for those of you who feel stuck, or unfulfilled, or like things could just be better if only XYZ — I want to remind you that so much can happen in just a few years. If I can do this, you can too — whatever “this” is for you.

My work reflects our shared human experience, in all its different, messy forms, and I feel most satisfied when something I made helps somebody feel like someone else out there gets them. I’m also inspired by letters, nature, folk art, geometry, cultural quirks, and the crazy urban landscape of Southern California.

When I’m not working, you can find me hanging out with my partner Seth and his 8-year old son, searching for the perfect taco, having tragically unprofitable business ideas, and overcoming the constant guilt I feel for not tweeting enough."

CONTACTING STUDIOS - getting replies

We have now started to get some replies from some of the studios we have emailed. Myself and Jenna will now take the time to get together and figure out when is best for both of us to visit the studios. Exciting stuff!