I have a habit of disappearing. I’m no Houdini, I promise you that. I might exist on a social media blitz high – posting on my group, , , yada – for a couple weeks and then disappear for awhile. That’s the nature of my existence, for now anyways, due by in large to the multitude of constraints hoisted upon me.
Yes, even while I’ve been on a 2-month staycation from the Day Job – let’s not mention that too much since I’m 36 hours away from its demise – I’ve been busy working. I’m not one to rest on my laurels. If given 2 months off, I try to use my time wisely (sorta). I believe in a philosophy of working hard and playing hard. On this staycation, however, it’s certainly been more work than anything. Between doing stuff around the house, selling things on eBay, getting rid of stuff around the house, pumping out pattern updates, and working with clients – other self-published crochet and/or knit designers – I’ve kept myself busy. Such is the case of the later in the last several days.
KRW Knitwear
contacted me nearly 8 months ago about doing the graphics for her pattern line. She’s a busy mom with an equally busy schedule of teaching classes and designing for herself and other notable publications and is like most prolific designers in that she’d rather have someone else deal with the graphics-end of things while she concentrates on the designing itself.
When Karen approached me about laying out her patterns, she was doing what most designers without graphics experience or a graphics budget do: use a basic word processing program to layout her work. Yes, one can get by doing this, but there are so many limitations to those programs, nor do they ever produce something that’s as polished in presentation as one can achieve through traditional print-publication software. That’s where I come in.
Karen wanted something simple (“minimal” is what she said) in terms of layout and color palette. She had gone ahead and had a really lovely logo created by another designer. It’s a yarn ball that leads up to a butterfly which represents her “Nonna.”
by Missa of KPixie
The layout needed to reflect her color choices she’d started with: brown and pink with lots of white space in the layout. She wanted a flexible layout that could work if she decided to include diagrams, schematics, and step-outs, or not. Additionally, she was hoping to cut down her page usage which for a simple pattern was eating up sometimes as much as 6 pages. And we certainly did that as the longest pattern of hers is only 2 pages (one sheet of paper back to back)! Now Karen is saving lots of money in up-front printing costs, enabling her to put that money back into the “profit” column without compromising the integrity of her patterns.
With a lot of back-and-forth, Karen and I, in a host of synergistic email conversations, came up with a layout design that we both love. It’s fun, airy, and flexible, simple without being understated. The important pre-pattern information – yarn, hook, notions, etc) are all in neatly organized brown framed bubbles on the side of each main product shot. The romance text – that name makes me chuckle because I instantly think of the word SWOON – is in a prominent, brown colored box near the top as well as the name of the pattern, which makes it easy for LYS’s with a lot of patterns to locate quickly. And the pattern text flows seamlessly from there on down.
Front pages of several KRW Knitwear patterns
The layout also translates well to her catalog, which she also had me do over too. The catalog is designed for 11×17 format so the back and front cover are on the same side with the two inside pages next to one another. On the bottom of the two inside pages is a series of descriptions about the features of KRW patterns as well as pointing out that Karen teaches classes and is going to be selling some kits for her patterns in January 2011.
Back and Front Cover
Two Inside Pages
There’s nothing more exciting than a make-over!
