Party invites

Over the years, lots of people have asked me to do invitations for weddings, parties and events they have been organising. There wasn't any money in doing these as most were for mates but it gave me an excuse to play about and I was usually given free rein to do what ever I liked.

A selection of these is here; starting with this one, from August 2003, for a 40th birthday party where the birthday boy was being given an old camper van that his wife and friends had clubbed together to buy him.

From 2004, this was a fancy dress party where the guests had to come as their hero or heroine. There can be no better options than Superman and Elvis for the two ways that brief can be construed. I was very pleased with this at the time and still think it looks good. The symmetry and cleanness work well although the Superman image could do with being sharper.

From 2006, this one was for a mate's 30th birthday weekender in the highlands of Scotland, hence the Braveheart theme, which luckily the man in question had turned up to a fancy dress party as a few months previously.

Another party invite, this time for a flat moving-out party. My idea was to do it as a newspaper front page and I was quite pleased with the result though I could possibly have done with a hand coming up with the copy.

This one was for a 40th birthday weekender in May 2007. The lady in question is a big lover of frogs and has a huge collection of frog related things so there was only ever one option of what was going to be on the invitation.

A wedding reception invitation from May 2008 where I got to show the prettier side of what I can do instead of just the jokey stuff. Despite it's simplicity, I was quite pleased with the results of this, and the bride and groom were both delighted.

From September 2009, another 30th birthday fancy dress party. This time the theme was The Big B as the girl was known as Biff, so a Biffa Bin seemed logical to me.

This one is more recent, from May 2010. An engagement party for a couple who both work in a bar called The Phoenix, so I put Phoenix instead of Pretty and added the happy couple's heads in place of Julia Roberts and Richard Gere, Phoenix Woman. I copied the font style for the details on the reverse. These got a good reception from all who saw them.

This type of thing is an opportunity to do something light-hearted and please myself pretty much as I don't look to get paid for these. For the same reason I'm not usually going to spend hours on it endlessly tweaking it to be perfect. 

Some of the other work I have done more recently I have really pored over for a long time.

Stevenson College

In June 2005 I started working full time at Stevenson College Edinburgh, as a Desktop Publisher, whilst still carrying on doing a bit of freelance design work, club promotion and DJing.

My work involved lots of different stuff including: typesetting and preparing reports, forms and course materials; designing brochures, posters and leaflets; and creating and sourcing illustrations and graphics. I had to ensure all materials produced complied with the corporate standards and take into account accessibility issues.

It was a good job; it had a varied workload and I worked with a great couple of girls who kept me amused even during the boring times.

Some examples of my work follow. The first is an A4 flyer advertising a course with an application form overleaf. I designed the layout and created the form, also an electronic version which could be filled in online.

The next piece is a 4 page A4 booklet advertising open learning courses which was litho printed, I sourced all the images, did the typography and designed the layout on this. It was a bit of a challenge to fit the text on in a nice way but I was very pleased with the end result.

This poster was used to advertise a charity event one of the students at the college was organising. The typefaces and layout was supposed to convey the fun nature of the event.

These two posters were to advertise a competition and an event that the Film and Media department were running. I tried a couple of techniques here that I hadn't used before so I was happy with they way they turned out.

I enjoyed my time at Stevenson immensely but after a while I found myself starting to get stuck in a bit of a rut and seeing the same jobs come in every year so in November 2007 I left for pastures new.

I still had bits of freelance work on the go and was still DJing and promoting club nights so I was very busy but felt the need for a new challenge.