Transcripts
1. Hello!: Hi, I'm Nicky. I'm a calligrapher and watercolour artists, and I work primarily with weddings, so I designed invitations, suites, Dan details, and signage for weddings. Now today's sculpture, of course, is going to focus on how to get inspiration for your invitation designs. You don't necessarily need to make wedding invitations. You could make birthday invitations, baby shower, a bridal shower, even stationery. I really just want to talk to you about how to gain inspiration without necessarily looking at other artist's work or other pieces of stationery. So I'm gonna show you my client process where I'm gonna give you the questions I'd like to ask my clients. Then we're gonna move onto a very kind of topic that doesn't get discussed enough I feel, but as a topic of copying and other artists work, which is a big no-no. But we'll talk all about that. And I'm going to talk to you about inspiration versus actually copying somebody's artwork. And then lastly, I'm going to show you how I design a mood board that helps me design the actual sweep. This course will not cover the actual designing in Illustrator that I do for this week, but it'll show you how you go from meeting with my client into inspiration, MOOC, boring. Thank you so much for watching this course and I hope you really enjoy it if you have any questions at all, please feel free to reach out to me in the comments or discussion section. Think if you're wondering what the weird noises are in the background. It's probably because of this creature R3 here. She was a puppy and she hasn't quite learned term meanders home venue.
2. Getting To Know Your Clients: One very important thing when onboarding and invitation client is to meet with your client. And I know we're in the middle of a worldwide pandemic great now. So meeting with your client is not always an option or to meet with them in person. But either have a Zoom meeting with them or a phone call. It's absolutely imperative. I think that there's, you can give somebody a questionnaire, but there's no better way to really know who they are and their personalities and to meet with them in person. So I love doing happier with my clients. I have had some of the best like margherita and taco dates with some of my potential clients. All of those turned into them being my clients. But do it everyone and have a coffee day, do a zoom meeting, but you really just need to get to know your clients. Now, I wanted to share with you some questions that I like to ask. I do wanna say that I do send a questionnaire is actually on my website when people wanna hire me for custom invitation sweets, they fill out a questionnaire and I have some general questions on there such as, what day are you getting married? Of course, super important. Where's your wedding venue? If they wanna share their story with me or share their wedding website with me, they have that option. I also ask them if they have a Pinterest board or a color palette. And one of the most important questions I ask is what their budget is. I have a dropdown with four different tiers of pricing that they can choose from. This really helps me from running into the issue where somebody wants to hire me. We meet together and I find out that there are budget for a wedding invitations is $800, where mind minimum is 2 thousand. And in this situation, it's a bummer because you just wasted like two hours of your time meeting with them when they can't even afford you. So I really highly suggest having your budget on your website if you don't want to give them an exact budget right away because there is a lot of variables that you want to discuss, at least have a range on your website so you can get a general idea of their budget. So here are the questions I like to ask when we get to meet together. Obviously, number one, how did you meet? Where are you getting married, wedding date. You might already know that. They already gave that to you. Make sure you bring that information up so they know that you listen to what's your engagement story. I love to hear how people got engaged. It's a special, really, really special time and people love to tell you the story, so it's good to ask. Third, what do you like to do together? Do they like to play sports together? Do they do art together or ceramics? Do they just like, you know, are they Netflix and chill kinda people? An important question to ask next, what do you do for work? I know this might seem like a kind of weird question and you can phrase it however you like to your potential client. But one of my clients, they couple was. Oceanographer. And then the shoes are marine biologists. And the, her fiance was a diver in the Navy. So their careers were really important in how they met. And I wanted to incorporate that and their invitation sweet. So I ended up doing some really cool watercolor artwork for that thoughts wildlife to ask what they do for work. I think it can be helpful. It can also help you understand why they might not be responding to you. I have clients who are nurses who work that 07:00 PM to 07:00 AM shift and they're exhausted during the day, so they're not going to respond to me at eight o'clock in the morning. Another question, how do you want people to feel when they get your invites? And the male, this is super, super, I know I'm saying all of these are important, but this quote is very important because do they want people to feel like they're getting invited to this party? Do they want people to feel like this is a very elegant, sophisticated event? Do they want people to feel excited? You know, those types of things. What vibe do you want for your wedding to have? Some people, again, they want, they're wanting to feel very sophisticated, elegant, high-class. Some people, myself included. I wanted our wedding to be like an outdoor or a backyard party. So everybody has a different vibe that they want for your wedding. It's a great question to ask. Another one is, are there any hobbies or activities you really enjoy together? They might go into that a little bit when you ask what you do to the other, but try to understand them as a couple. What do they like to do? Are they really active? Are they more? Are they into wine tasting? These questions become important as well. If you're the type of person who likes to buy a gift for your clients. When clients spend a lot of money with me, I'd like to buy them the gift at the end of our project together. And by asking this question, I've discovered a lot of things about my clients and one of my clients really loved to kill us. So I got our tequila that I personally love, but I wouldn't do that for everybody because not everybody loves tequila. So this is a good question to ask, not only when you go into designing the invitation sweets, but if you ever want to give them a gift. And lastly, we covered this already, but what, what's your budget? This is a question you wanna ask at the beginning before you even get together at them, so nobody waste anytime. But this is also important question to bring up again when discussing the invitation. Sweet, because they might want handmade paper, but they don't have the budget for handmade paper. So this helps you to just really kind of rein in those types of things early. So you're managing every buddies expectations. Okay, the next thing we're going to talk about in the next video is inspiration versus copying designs. This is a super hot topic right now. And I think it's so important for us as artists to know how to gain inspiration without copying and other artists work.
3. Inspiration vs. Copying: Alright, let's talk about the elephant in the room, copying versus inspiration. I know when you first started out, it can seem really daunting to come up with your own designs. And a lot of times you look at other designers to get ideas, or you think that's the right way to get ideas when you're just starting out. And it's not. If you do that over and over again and just copy somebody else's work, you're going to end up never developing a style and you're also potentially could get in legal trouble. So just to let you know that I'm human too, and this happens to a lot of people. So if you've ever copied somebody's work, you're not alone. When I first started as a calligrapher, it was common to do styles shoots. So stylish shoes, basically just a lot of wedding vendors getting together producing this kind of mock wedding, and everybody brings their stuff, they get amazing pictures of it. Well, not always, but usually. And then they try to publish it or you have photos to use for your own business? Well, the wedding planner sent me the mood board and on the moon Board was the invitation sweet? And she told me, I want the imitation. So utilising exactly like this and me being this new calligrapher, I had no idea that it was wrong to do that. So I copied it exactly side. No, it looked awful because I nowhere near the skills that this original artists had, but I didn't have the confidence to say, well, I want to design something that's my style. I just copied this other style. And anyway, long story short, a, somebody who was kind enough to tell me that it was not right to copy and other artists work. And that's when I started to really look into this and see that it's kind of a huge deal. People copy other people's work all the time and you can actually be sued for doing that. So rule number one, don't copy another artist's work. And mainly because you'll never develop your own style. And it's super, super important for you to develop your own style because otherwise you're just a virgin of somebody else. Okay. So what do you do when you're first starting out as a wedding stationary and say you're making wedding invitations or you want to make wedding invitations, but you feel completely lost. You don't know where to start. So I will say that looking at invitations when you're in that early stage is not bad. You know, it helps you get ideas. But be mindful of the way that you're getting ideas. For example, if you are looking through all these invitations, you're not going to select this one and say, who I really like this, I'm gonna copy it exactly. You might look at this and say, I like how this has a unique shape around it. Maybe you do a circle or a triangle or something. Or you like the way the font is laid out here. Or like, I like, this is left aligned. Making your wedding invitation left aligned is not copying somebody style using all the same fonts that this person did and spacing is copying their style. So just be mindful of that. I know sometimes when you're just starting out, you need to kinda look at the layout of an invitation. Sweet. Something that I did when I first started was I just went through invitations and I would make a note about every kind of detailed I was being. So here you can see they're using a script font and just a regular, I think this is a serif font. Another thing, left alignment, center alignment. Again, this is just Pinterests. I don't know whose work all this stuff is. And the hub layout has artwork in the background. Minimalism, those types of things. You can notice these things but not copy and invitation sleep. So if you are just starting out, it's okay to do that. I suggest being really detail oriented when you look at the invitations, What do you like about them? What are the aspects that you like? And then create something totally different. But just kind of, you know, you can also play around with this stuff as long as you're not selling it, you're not posting it on your social media. It's okay to like play with the idea of maybe a design that you saw. I for sure did that when I started with my chalk lettering because I just needed to practice. So I would see stuff that people would do and I would recreate it. But I never ever posted it on my social media and I never would sell it because it was a copy. But it helps expand my skill level and it helped me to learn kinda different layouts that I could do because I started with that kind of layout. I hope I make sense. Now that we've laid the foundation and everybody's aware that copying and other artists work is kind of yucky. Not kinda get the, it's very eth0 and you should not do it. But I've explained to you how you can start off by looking at different layouts. And I also encourage you to design different layouts. So when you started it, invitations design, try it a bunch of different ways, moved things around, experiment, it's okay to experiment. You don't have to make the perfect invitation the very first time you create it. So now we've laid that foundation. We're gonna move into concepting and I'm gonna show you how I concept based on the couples that I am working with.
4. Concepting: Now that we've chatted about what kinda questions you should ask in your client meetings. And we've also discussed why copying is really bad. And kind of explain to you what inspiration is vs, vs copying. Now we're going to actually move into the concepting phase. So the concepting phase, you're going to use those questions that you asked your clients and kind of create a mood board or grab images from that. So we need a couple, right? So our couple, I just grabbed an image off of an Splash. It's a stock image website. And we're just going to pretend this is our couple for today, this is Justin and Emma. And obviously you'd use your real clients for this. But I also think that this is a great exercise. You don't necessarily have to have a picture of them, but I'm using this because we're doing a video. But you don't necessarily have to have a picture of them. You can just make up this couple in your mind and then design an imitation suite that would reflect them as people. And it's a really fun, it's a good exercise to really grow your creativity and your skill level. Back to Justin MN, just in an MR are couple that we're going to do this or design this mood. Ward four, they got engaged recently at the beach. They were high school sweethearts. They're in their early twenties there, obviously super in love and excited about getting married. They're very active. They love to serve. They loved to ride their bikes by the beach, but they also really love the desert. And therefore they're getting married in the desert and they're getting married up the Ace Hotel. And they really love that kind of met like vintage, retro vibe that Palm Springs has. And therefore we're going to incorporate some of those vintage fonts into their invitation sleep. They also really loved to kill us. And the other aspects that I would like to bring in if I can. And again, there were high school sweethearts. They owe the vibe of their wedding. They walked there wanting to feel like a big party. They don't want it to feel stuffy. They don't want it to be overly sophisticated. They just want this final retro party via their wedding. And knowing that will really help us to pick images for them. So they like the desert, they're getting married in the desert. They like that retrovirus. They want a fun party feel and they are very open to the colors that I bring into their invitation. Sweet. Okay. We are going to get started. We are in or on Pinterest. I like to use Pinterest because it's a search engine ultimately, and it's just really image heavy. You can use Google image search as well. But I just love to be on Pinterest because I feel like you get lots of inspiration. Now since I have a station or what's going to, am I pin a lot of stationary? What's going to happen is Pinterest gives me stationary to look at. So what you can do if you really don't want to be bothered by it. And it's hard for you to keep a clear mind. Just tied the pin and say not relevant to me or whatever. But that can be helpful for you if you're feeling like you're seeing too many invitations, sweets and it's clouding your creativity. So we'll hide all these. Okay, so what I like to do is create a little folder over here, and this is Justin and and I'm going to pull all the images that I think would be helpful in the mood board over here. And I will say that when you pull images from Pinterest, these images do not belong to you. You. A lot of this stuff is professional photography where people deserve to be paid for their work. So when you pull images just for your personal use, you might share it with the client just to get their input, but it's not to be sold. You should not ever posted on your social media are used on your website. These are images that are just for your frame of reference. I just wanted to clear that out really quick. So the first thing I'm going to search is let's do Palm Springs and see what comes up. And like I said, they really like that retro vibes. So this kinda gives me the retrovirus. What I'm looking for is just pictures that I like to look at it. So colors, textures, things that will give me some type of inspiration. You're not I'm not looking for an invitation suite for Palm Springs to copy. That is no, I'm not doing that. I'm looking for my own inspiration. I really like this with all the cactus them here. And they're color theme is kinda of an aqua blue. Let's do Palm Springs cactus and see what comes up. Aqua blue paints, yellows. They like those bright colors. So I'm just going along and seeing what I can find. And this is a long process. You guys this takes me a few hours. I am not going to have you be on here for a few hours with me. But I'm just going to show you really quick what I would do as I'm pulling images for inspiration. So right now, okay, I really like the texture in this. So the little dots that are on the cactus that might be a cool texture point to add to an invitation. So, so I'm going to pull that out. And normally I would relabel all of these images. But for time's sake, I'm not gonna do that. But right now, okay, this is a cool texture back here. You see this texture pattern. This could look really me an invitation SV and give it a retrovirus. Pulling that. And let's do, I kinda, Let's talk about colors. So maybe a marigolds color, C0, pulling up the flowers. So this color right here, I think, would look really cool. And something else you can do is a font. So let's look up retro fonts. Now let things with excusing. The thing with fonts is you need to pay for your font. If they don't come with the Creative suite, then that means that you need to pay for them and a good place to go. So look at this is best. Oh, here we go. Best. Free retro 19 seventies inspired bonds. So there are some free fonts out there. But if you go to places like Creative Market or even at sea, they sell fonts as well. You need to purchase the license that is adequate for how you're using it. You need to pay for fonts. They're not free just because you found them on the internet. What do we like? I kinda like this. I think this looks really, really cool. And it's a video, so I'm not sure if I can grab that. Let's see. What else we have. Like this, while there are a lot of free fonts, okay? I like this font right here, this tangerine font. And this is actually a font, or you can purchase it because it's going to lead you to create a market. Okay, and now we're in Creative Market and it says, what kinda license you need for whatever your dealings. So App, web font, desktop. I wonder if this is a this has to be a printed phone. Well, that's another that's a tutorial for another day. But anyways, I'm gonna save this to my board because I want to be able to access this font and know where it's at. And the other thing you can do is to have a Pinterest board specifically for your clients. Now, I recommend to keep your Pinterest SEO high to make these Board's Private. Otherwise, you're gonna kinda mess with your business posting if you use Pinterest for your business. Okay, so I'm gonna keep going and pin a bunch of stuff and then I'm gonna meet you back and we are going to actually put the mood boards together in Illustrator.
5. Creating Your Moodboard: Here we are. We're gonna make our board and I'm going to name this justin an MS mood board. And usually this is just for my own personal use. So it's not really that important. What I name it, just something that I can find and that's kinda big. Ha, let's do pixels. I'm going to do 1280 pixels by 40 pixels. Alright? The first thing I wanna do is I wanna label this just in an AMA. So I know. And then when they're getting married, April 20th, 2020. Oop, sorry, 2021, doesn't really matter. This is make-believe, but make sure you have it right. If it's only your clients, you do not want them thinking you didn't listen to them. I'm going to just increase the size of that. Lord. Here we go. Alright. Sorry, I'm a perfectionist, thus needs to be a little bit smaller. Okay? So the first thing I like to do is grab my color palette. And the way I'm gonna do the color palette is on the left-hand side here. Man, I've grabbed my ellipse tool and I'm going to make five circles. So I don't want that to have anything inside yet. So no fill. But we are gonna do a stroke and black just so I can see it. And then what I do is just copy and paste this five times. Again, this is something that is for your internal use. Sometimes Ina, You want to show the client, that's fine. I recommend if you have a lorry, I recommend if you have a picky client showing them the mood board so they can get an idea of the the things that you're looking into. But I will say too, is that some clients just don't understand mood boards. So be smart about that. Like is it a client that we'll understand a mood board or is it a client that a mood board isn't really going to help? It's just gonna confuse them more. I would say if you have someone that's very, I've had clients that consider themselves really artsy and they really want to be involved with the mood board. So that's usually the kind of people that like to see that kind of stuff. Other ions, let's say, just say, you know, do whatever I trust you, which is just the best. So these images I'm grabbing colors from, so I'm going to put that in here. And I'm just gonna get my eyedropper tool. Now filling these little circles we want to use the colors that we're using for the invitation seat. So I'm just going to grab my eye dropper tool and select and pick the color that I want. So I like that Lynn and I actually really like the lighter pink too. And I might make it even lighter. Kind of a peachy tone. Oops. So select your colors as slay. I like having the colors along this side because I think it really is helpful in designing. I want something that's a little brighter green. Another thing I like to do is use a Pantone book. So viola Pantone book, that's a great way to get the colors that you want. Plus if you need to print in those colors, you you will need, I mean, if you're using pants on, so if you're doing something like letter, you would need to know the pant Hilton color. And lastly, I'm going to do kind of an awkward blue color. Now this seems like a lot of colors, but you can incorporate them in different ways, so it doesn't have to be like all of these colors right in your face all the time. Now I'm just going to put in my images. I'm gonna get rid of that because I just wanted that for the color. I don't want this to have an outline. Okay, and let's see what else is in here. So some textures that I like, so I really liked that texture. And I like the texture of this cactus. I wanna grab some textures from these. And I, you know, I like the pattern and textures. I like the vertical lines here. So what I'm gonna do is make little circles on my mood board with them. And I'm just gonna go and grab my ellipsoidal. And you could do squares if you want. And I'm going to select an area that I like the texture. And I'm also gonna press shift, sorry, go back up and grab your selection tool shifts. So I'm selecting this and the circle and hold down shift, I'm sorry. And then I'm gonna go up to Object, a clipping mask. And now I have this little circle that has texture in it. So that texture can give me a lot of inspiration and help with my design. I'm gonna do the same thing here. Again shift. I'm selecting both the circle and the image. Objects. Clipping mask make. Now I have this cool little texture. So I'm not gonna make you guys watch me create this whole thing, but I'm going to add my other images and I will meet you back to explain why I put the images where I put them. Now that we have our mood board finished, I want to explain to you kind of what I did here. So on the left-hand side, like I mentioned before, this is our color palette for the invitation. Sweet. Then I really liked this font and I want to keep it on the mood board. One because I want to look at it, but also because I want to remember what the name is so that I can purchase the uncreative market. Then I incorporated this little oasis motel retro sign. Just for inspiration. The font is cool, but it also just like the shapes and things that we're used to now are helpful as well. That I have made textures. So I had that cactus vertical texture as well as this kind of flower retro texture of the wall. Then I brought in the tequila and lines. I want to find a way to use that in the invitation. So yeah, I'm thinking maybe on the details card, having maybe a margarita or a tequila bottle and a wedge of lime. I love the colors here and I also like the texture in the cactus. Palm Springs is known for palm trees. And I really liked this little flamingo because that's kind of something you see a lot as well together in like advertising and designs and just when you go to Palm Springs. And then lastly, this painting, because I liked the way that it's laid out. So kinda coming up the edges of the paper. Or sorry, this is a Canvas but it made me think, OK, if I did a invitations, we, It might be cool to have the palm trees coming up on the outside or a cactus going up the side. Alright, so that's how I create my mood boards. And I hope you guys enjoyed this tutorial. I'm not going to go into me actually creating the invitation suite. That will be another video for another time. But I wanted to show you how a concept without looking at invitations, and this is how I do it. It's super fine. Gets a look through all these pictures and images, and it will help you not to copy another artist's work. Thanks again for watching and please do the class project.
6. SS Class Project: For your class project, I want you to imagine a couple who came to you for wedding invitations. Make them up. Who are they? What are their names? When are they getting married? What do they like, what they dislike? Just have fun with it. You can honestly use a couple that you know, you could do that as well, but do that. And then I want you to create a mood board and please post it in the class project section. I love, love, love seeing what you guys come up with. And I hope that this course just helped you to get inspiration from different places that you didn't necessarily look before. Thanks for watching.
Nikki Hess, Artist & Corgi Mama
