Specialization in Stationery Design: From Invitations and Greeting Cards to Branding

Introduction

Now you will see how stationery design will turn illustration and graphic ideas into objects you will use every day. You will discover how concepts, layouts, materials, and printing choices will shape postcards, notebooks, or stickers, while production, packaging, and distribution will bring your style to real products.

1m

Influences | Marjolein Delhaas

Now, I will tell you how office supplies, Rotterdam and the work of some amazing graphic designers shaped me into what I am and do today.

8m

Influences | Sarah Lewis

One of the biggest lessons I learnt while I was studying was to look outside of the world of graphic design for influences. That doesn't mean that you can't be engaged and pay attention to what people are doing in the field, but if you are working on a project about cats, you should go out and learn about cats, not a graphic design that someone has already created about cats.

9m

Influences | Lauren Radley

Now, I will tell you about some of the artists and books that have influenced and inspired me and still do.

10m

Influences | Jessica Roux

In this lesson, I’ll show you a few of my favorite artists who make beautifully illustrated products, as well as historical artists who influence my work today.

4m

Influences | Javier Zamora

In this lesson I am going to talk to you about my references. In general, everything that originated in the Bauhaus and in the ULM school later has a great impact on me. From Bauhaus artists, such as Max BILL or designers such as Otl Aicher, to professionals from other disciplines such as the architect Campo Baeza or the photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher. In all my work there is a great influence by geometry, basic shapes and the reduced use of elements. It could also be said that there is a great influence of German design, a rational and concept-based design.

7m

The Materials

First of all, I’lI explain what materials you need to bring to this course to a successful end and teach you five things about paper you need to know to create a qualitative product.

14m

Minimalism and Simplicity in Design

Here, I'll explain to you how to minimise and simplify your design. I will also explain how the minimal design of my annual planner came about.

7m

Typography Research

Now, you'll get a quick, basic introduction into typography and typefaces. Then, I’ll give you some interesting tips on resource material.

7m

Exploring Binding Options

In this lesson, I'll talk about a five commonly used binding methods and will teach you how to bind a simple dummy in a few steps.

12m

Does the Product Exist?

It's time to show you how to make a research. You can’t start creating a new design without a thorough research of what the market has to offer.

3m

Collecting Content

To finish this unit, I will show you how to gather content for your project on the basis of my graduation project. Besides that, I’ll teach you how to create an easy tool to collect your content.

4m

Organising the Content

Let me start by teaching you how to organize and structure your content by making selections and labelling it.

4m

Searching for Inspiration

In this lesson, you'll see how to make your own analogue and digital mood board, by collecting whatever inspires you and by carefully selecting and arranging it.

2m

Sketching Ideas by Hand

Time to start sketching your first ideas. It is very important to execute this very first step of thinking of your design away from the computer and give your brain the space to think without any restrictions.

4m

From the Paper to the Computer 1

I’ll show you how to start setting up the first ideas into the computer and how to start sketching more in detail.

19m

From the Paper to the Computer 2

Here I'l continue teaching you how to work on the sketching of the project. I'll share my best tips and tricks to achieve an incredible result.

7m

Trial and Error: Finalizing the Design 1

It is very important that during the digital sketch process you print as much as possible to evaluate your designs. In this lesson, I'll talk about it on detail.

16m

Trial and Error: Finalizing the Design 2

To finish, I'll also show you how I made my design choices according to the many prints I made during this lesson.

4m

Binding the Pages

I’ll show you how to set up the document so the pages will be arranged according to the chosen binding method. And I’ll repeat the saddle stitch binding technique you’ve learned before in the course to actually bind my course project.

6m

How to Produce Your Product

Now, I'll tell you more on how I developed my product step by step from a manually produced product to a fully manufactured and commercialized item, by sharing some of my experiences.

2m

How to Create a Collection

Lastly, I'll take you on my journey of how two products in 2012 grew out to a collection of several paper goods.

4m

Think like a Graphic Designer

Before we get going on the specifics of invitation design, I want to talk to you briefly about how to approach invitation design like a graphic designer.

9m

The Brief

Ok, you’ve been commissioned to design an invitation. Now it’s time to talk about briefs. In this lesson, I’m going to take you through the briefing process and why it is so important.

4m

What Do We Need to Ask

So when we have our client meeting, what do we need to ask? Let’s run through the briefing sheet.

11m

The Debrief

You’ve had your briefing and you think you know what the client needs. But it’s always worth making sure. Once I’ve met with a client I always go away and write up my understanding of what they want. I will read back through my briefing sheet and any notes that I took and then fill in the briefing document.

3m

How to Quote

I get asked a lot about how to quote on a job, and it is probably one of the hardest parts of my job. Honestly, there is no magic formula. It will depend on where you are in the world, who your clients are, how experienced you are. You can either choose to charge a flat rate for the project or bill an hourly or daily rate and give the client an estimate of how long it will take.

11m

Create a Mindmap

Before we start to look at anything visual I want you to get a pen and paper and write down everything that comes into your mind from the brief, elements, or points of interest that stand out.

6m

References and Research

Now that we have a big old list of ideas, we want to find lots of visual references that we’ll use to create a visual language.

11m

Mood Boards

Ok, we have lots of ideas and references. Now we need to organise our thoughts and pull them into three mood boards, with distinct visual directions.

15m

Present Your Ideas to the Client

I try to do this in a call or face to face rather than sending the PDF on its own. At this stage of the process, you are working collaboratively with the client, you’re discussing ideas and getting their feedback rather than presenting a finished design, so treat it like a working session.

9m

Format, Materials, and Finishes

In this unit, we’re going to work through the building blocks of your invitation. And the first element we’re going to consider is the format.

8m

Typeface and Colour Palette

When working with an invite, the typeface is one of your main design elements, so we want to take the time to pick the right one.

16m

Visual Assets

Visual assets are any other graphic element you can add into your design to help bring a certain flavour or style, help the reader navigate the information by highlighting certain elements and breaking up text.

11m

Layout 1

Our toolkit is ready, so now we can think about the best way to lay the information out.

18m

Layout 2

The second part of this video lesson is all about text placement.

20m

Final Checks

At this point, the design should look finished. However, there are a few checks I usually run through to make sure it's finished. Let's see what I pay attention to in this phase.

8m

Presenting Your Work

How you present your work will depend on your design. Our aim here is to help the client understand what the final piece will look like, and sell in your thinking and ideas. I usually put together a presentation deck and share it as a PDF.

14m

Amends

In an ideal world, the client comes back, tells you they love it and you can send it straight to print. In reality, there are almost always changes.

7m

Sending the Files to Print

Once you have the final signoff from the client (get this on email so that there can be no misunderstanding), you will need to artwork the file and export the files for the printers.

12m

Materials and Software

In this lesson, we will talk about the materials that we will use to produce our final project, and I will be telling you all about the final project itself.

3m

Trends, Inspirations and Mood Boards

Now, I will talk about the greetings card market, trends, and how to gather inspiration and create a mood board for your new collection.

6m

Your Creative Style

It's time to talk about finding your creative voice and how to feel confident in your own style of illustration. I am going to tell you a little about how I have learnt to do this. We are also going to do some exercises that will help you to love what you create and the way that you draw. Finally, we will see how to create a style that really stands out from the crowd.

20m

Cards and Content

In this lesson, we are going to plan your range, decide on what card categories we will be designing, and think of catchy phrases and messages for them.

9m

Hand Drawn Typography

To end this unit, we are going to learn and practise a few techniques that will help you to develop confidence in creating hand drawn typography for your card designs. We will discuss why and how typography is so important in card design, and have a go at a few different exercises that will help you to develop some typographic styles.

16m

Ideas, Thumbnails and Composition

In this lesson, we are getting our ideas down on paper, sketching thumbnails and developing our design.

19m

Digitally Importing and Refining Your Sketch 1

Let's refine our thumbnail sketches digitally!

9m

Digitally Importing and Refining Your Sketch 2

Now, we will keep refining our sketch until we are happy with it.

13m

Adding Colours, Textures and Details 1

In this lesson, we are going to learn how to create our finished artwork and get it ready for print. I am using Procreate, but I want to stress that if you do not wish to work digitally, it is totally fine. Just keep in mind that these lessons will still be relevant to you. The first step of this process is to add colours.

15m

Adding Colours, Textures and Details 2

Now, we are going to finish our bottom colours and start adding some details and textures by mixing our brushes.

16m

Adding Colours, Textures and Details 3

It's time to add the final touches to our illustration and get it ready for the next stage: post-production and printing.

12m

Formatting Your Cards

In this lesson, we are going to format our artwork into a card template and prepare the file for printing.

7m

Printing Your Cards

I am now going to tell you how to go about the process of printing your final design. We will discuss paper stocks, quantities, and eco principles.

3m

How to Sell Your Cards and Market Yourself

Let's see the basics of how to start a business selling your cards. We will also be covering lots of the key points to consider, including the importance of social media to sell, what selling platform to choose, pricing, and going the extra mile for your customers!

6m

Introduction to Product Illustration

We’ll start off by thinking about the types of products we want to make and what we want to be known for. As a guide, I'll explain the basic steps I follow when I want to add a new item to my product line and ensure I'm making something worthwhile.

5m

Building Your Brand

When you’re first starting your shop, you need to consider how to make your work appear cohesive—your products should match your idea of how you want your brand to be interpreted. Here, I'll explain how to define our brand values and choose products we’d like to make and align with those values.

5m

Vendors and Printing Needs

One of the most important things when creating your products is finding vendors to bring your ideas to life. So let's go over how to source vendors and printers for our products.

5m

Financial Aspects: Pricing and Budget

In this lesson, I’ll share my best practices for pricing your items fairly and ethically. I’ll also show you how I create a budget for new products.

6m

Starting the Illustration

To begin, we’ll create a sketch of several elements that all work together in a cohesive illustration. From there, we’ll finish the drawing. I prefer to work in graphite and then add digital color, but you can work with whatever technique you prefer.

8m

Finishing the Illustration 1

Once the graphite drawing is complete, we can add color by digitally painting in Photoshop. I'll show you how to refine the illustration using adjustment layers.

19m

Finishing the Illustration 2

Next, I’ll do some adjustment layers to brighten, saturate, change colors, and bring out the shading and highlights more dramatically. Once I'm happy with the result, I call it complete and move to the next stage!

21m

Rearranging to Fit Printer Templates 1

Now that the illustration is finished, I'll show you how to pull different pieces of it apart for each product. For my project, I'll start creating a notepad, which I want to be a lined to-do list. To do so, we’ll be using templates provided by our printing vendor to make sure to take into account bleed and color spaces.

21m

Rearranging to Fit Printer Templates 2

Let's continue with the sticker sheet and the greeting card, and then see how we can upload the finished artwork online for print. This is actually a very easy process, and I’ll show you a quick walkthrough.

16m

Photographing the Products

How will you show your customers what you made? You’ll need to take some photos! In this lesson, we’ll cover how to photograph our newly arrived products.

10m

Online Shop Basics

You’re now ready to set up your shop! I want to share with you some tips to help you set up an online shop, upload your photos, and write engaging descriptions of your products.

11m

Creating a Wholesale Catalog

As shops and retailers find our products, they might want to offer them to their customers as well! In this lesson, we’ll cover how to create an informative wholesale catalog or line sheet to send to interested stockists.

6m

Packing and Shipping Orders

In this lesson, you'll learn how to pack and ship your orders directly to the customer as well as to your wholesale stockists.

11m

Marketing

If you're wondering how to increase your sales and get your work in front of more eyes, don't miss this lesson! I'll give you some marketing tips for showing your work to the world.

4m

Craft Shows and Tips

Craft shows are a great way to make some additional sales! So, to end this unit, I want to share with you my tips and best practices for making craft shows work for you.

4m

Materials

We begin by reviewing the materials that we have at our disposal to be able to face the challenge of creating a corporate stationery. It is key to know the different types of paper and the brands behind them. We will see what brands like Fedrigoni, GF Smith, Arjowiggings can offer you, and I will also show you a website like Minke's, which has a very valuable tool; your paper selector.

8m

Printing techniques and finishes

In this lesson I will show you the different printing and finishing techniques that you will be able to implement in the development of your stationery. We will discuss the different printing techniques and finishes available using examples of both works by Plácida and detailed images of other inspiring works.

15m

Typography

Now is the time for typography. We are going to make a complete typological classification of the great typographic groups that exist and we will talk about the features that differentiate them. I will give you some guidelines to make a correct typeface selection and how to properly combine different fonts. Finally, we will take a tour of various type foundries, analyzing what each of them can contribute and showing their font catalogs. Although in this course we will not delve into typography as such, we will review basic notions such as its classification, and see some foundries where to buy quality fonts for our project.

16m

Stationery: the differentiating element of your brand

In this lesson we will see how a stationery store in the digital age can be the differentiating element of a brand. We will see the project "Allegation to free time" made for Minke. Minke is a graphic production consultancy and he commissioned us a piece that could function as a sample of everything they are capable of doing with paper.

9m

Flexible visual identity

Now we are going to talk a little about what we understand by a flexible identity system capable of adapting to different media either online or offline without losing its essence and communicating in a homogeneous way. It is important to understand identity as a system and not as something static in order to implement your stationery in a coherent way and under the same stylistic guidelines, and not make the mistake of repeating the same rigid structure in each of the stationery elements.

5m

Brand Personality and Other Considerations

I am going to explain three preliminary considerations before getting fully into the development of our stationery. Considerations such as which pieces we are going to design, what is the format that we are going to use within the most common paper standards and what is the information that we have to lay out and rank in each piece of stationery.

6m

Project Presentation: Analysis and Concept

In this lesson I will present the project that will serve as a guide for the subsequent development of the stationery and with which we will go step by step from its analysis to its formalization. We focus on the analysis phase carried out with the project for "Derprosa" in order to find its tone and personality as we advanced in the previous lesson. Finally, we will arrive at the written conceptualization for the development of our brand. I want to show you how we deal with this work from the beginning because I think it can be useful when solving a visual identity work in an adequate way and, later, having all the necessary elements to start with the design of corporate stationery and packaging.

8m

Project Presentation: Concept and Form

Now I'm going to show you the brand redesign work we did, showing its graphic conceptualization and its formalization. In this formalization process we will see how its brand architecture, color range and the list of graphic applications necessary to complete all the stationery pieces were structured. This will be the last lesson so that we finally start working fully on the brand's stationery. After the detailed analysis and conceptualization work, it is time to transfer these concepts to a graphic representation.

7m

File Preparation and Custom Grid Design 1

In this lesson we are going to use all the graphic elements resulting from the visual identity such as the logo, the color palette and all the data of the company and its products, necessary to start designing each piece of stationery. We are going to put these elements together in the same work file and we are going to begin to order them and list a series of common guidelines as a style guide for all the pieces of stationery. Each piece has to share structure and has to be made under the same guidelines. To do this, we are going to create a base grid that will be the invisible structure that supports the development of our stationery and we will begin to test with different layout options.

15m

File Preparation and Custom Grid Design 2

We continue to design the different pieces of stationery, in this case we start with the business cards.

12m

File Preparation and Custom Grid Design 3

Now it is the turn of the packaging area to leave our stationery practically ready.

9m

Cleanliness, Prototyping and Readability

Once the different layout and grid tests have been carried out, we are going to evaluate and show the best options that help to understand the whole set as a system. We are going to create small paper prototypes to see if the chosen sizes in terms of format and text sizes really work.

17m

Presentation to the Client

We are in a decisive phase, the presentation of the work to the client. We are going to prepare a PDF presentation in which to individually show each of the pieces that make up the stationery. For this we will support ourselves in the use of mock-ups. We will see different websites in which to get quality mock-ups and we will work one by one each piece in Illustrator and Photoshop until we achieve an optimal presentation to show the client.

13m

Quotation of Parts and Client Authorization

It is very important that there is good communication between the printer and the designer. For this, we are going to prepare another technical presentation of each of the pieces in which we will include all the relevant information for the printer, from the run, measurements and types of paper to printing techniques and finishes. This same presentation will also serve as an authorization document for the client.

12m

Preparation of Final Artwork and Delivery for Printing 1

Once the client has accepted the quote made by the printing company, we proceed to carry out all the final arts step by step.

16m

Preparation of Final Artwork and Delivery for Printing 1

We continue to work on preparing the final arts for our stationery.

5m

Final Result

This is the last lesson of the course and the most desired. At last we receive all the stationery in full from the printing press and we will review it from start to finish to check that everything has been printed well with respect to the files made. We will see piece by piece how the combination of materials, finishes and layout seen in previous lessons makes a difference.

8m