CATEGORY: custom type

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FREE Holiday Gift tags

I recently did another custom type project for a client and was reminded of how much I miss it! It’s been a crazy busy year with all sorts of branding and web projects, but not much custom type work.

As the holidays are approaching things are starting to slow downs so I figured this would be the perfect opportunity to get out my watercolours and do a free downloadable DIY for you guys. Gift tags it is!

I had some coloured cardstock laying around from forever ago, which was the perfect thing to brighten up these guys. You don’t need a fancy printer and even plain white 8.5×11 (letter size) paper will do.

Two options for download:
– plain tags here
– black tags (so the type shows through if you have coloured paper) here

Enjoy and feel free to tag me @alicia_carvalh0 on instagram if you use them on your gifts this christmas!

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Custom Script Type

Here’s a quick view of a few more custom watercolour pieces I created for a marketing campaign. These pieces are targeted at a young, fashion-forward audience and will be sent out alongside summery jewellery pieces.

This project was a good reminder that sometimes it does take a few rounds of scrap paper to really get into a style and make it feel effortlessly beautiful. I especially had fun creating the playful lowercase m’s in “summer” and was super excited at how the word “swarovski” turned out.

I’ve been having a lot of fun exploring different type styles, and although they are quite varied at times, I do have my favourites. I am working on putting together a little overview page on my portfolio with some of my preferred styles that you can hire me for. In the meantime, if you need any custom type for your brand, event, product or personal project please feel free to contact me over here as I am taking new inquiries for the summer.

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Woman 2 Warrior

Last month I got to work with the lovely team over at Reformation PR, in collaboration with Easter Seals BC, who organized camps for children with disabilities. In order to raise money they host a Woman2Warrior race once a year. To create some hype online and make people aware of the race we worked on designing a simple custom type piece to be printed on t-shirts. Besides being for sale at the race the t-shirts were sent to local bloggers ahead of time, who shared the message on their social media outlets.

The concept for the t-shirts is “There is a warrior in the heart of every woman. She is strong, she is determined and she is powerful.”

Below you can see some of the discarded designs we played around with. In the end we choose a custom watercolour type in a calligraphic style, in order to contrast the powerful message with a feminine touch, click over to the portfolio to see the final design in action.

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I stand for animal welfare

I’m so excited about this! Paws for Hope is a charity I do contract work for every so often and it is always so much fun. They have an amazing little team and are always so passionate about everything they do. Paws for Hope recently reached out to me to design some t-shirts for them. The shirts will be worn by their team and be available for sale so they can collect funds to keep their mission of animal welfare going strong.

The team send me over a few general directions, mostly of what they did not want, and gave me a few awesome taglines to work with. The biggest challenge was that the shirts need to speak to both men and women. I’ve realized that no matter how much I enjoy illustrating my style is very much on the kids-end of things, which women may like, however it is definitely too cutesy for guys. With this in mind we focused mostly on text based designs. I will share all the final designs after the holiday season when the shirts have been printed.

In the meantime, as I was working on these concepts I was feeling really inspired and overflowing with ideas. Although illustrations were not really part of the plan I sat down one evening, just because I felt like it, and started doodling. I figured I’d have fun creating them and if Paws for Hope felt they could use them, then great, if not, I had just created something fun for myself.

I had so much fun creating these illustrations, that it really came through to the client. Paws for Hope loved the illustration and although they are on the cutesy side and no dudes will be running out to buy them, they will print a few runs of the illustration anyway, possibly a few smaller sizes for kids, and potential bumper stickers.

The lesson here is that, sometimes, when you are really into it, even though it’s not part of the original outline or brief, it’s fun to just go for it anyway, because you never know what will come from it.

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Watercolour Wedding Type

Remember these outtakes of custom wedding type I shared on the blog a few weeks ago? Well, I’ve finally added the final pieces to my portfolio. Pop on over to check them out!

It was a pleasure working with Tomasz, and I hope to do so again in the future :)

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custom wedding type

A few months ago the very talented Tomasz Wagner contacted me and asked if I wanted to collaborate on some wedding videos with him. I’m slightly obsessed with his work and love myself a good collaboration so I was all ears. Tomasz was looking to add some custom type goodness to the wedding videos he shoots. We quickly decided that we didn’t want to go super calligraphy-wedding-stylish since it doesn’t match his brand. Instead, we took a more fun and contemporary approach at some watercolor type.

Above are a few of the samples that didn’t make the cut. I’m waiting for all wedding videos to be released before I share all the finals, which will be happening in a few weeks :)

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sweater weather

I’ve been working on quite a few custom type pieces lately, many of which include watercolour. I had some leftover paint to use up this morning and started dreaming of gold and red hued fall days.

Summer is without a doubt my favourite season, however fall is slowly winning over my heart the older I get. Although I am long past September being a “back to school” month it does still feel like a month of new beginnings. I’m ready to switch in my shorts for jeans and sandals for boots. I’ve even picked up knitting again.

What is your favourite part of fall?

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