lily is 2!

Last month, our daughter celebrated her 2nd birthday.

We watercolored and designed these 5x5 invitations to commence her special day.

You can view the invitations we created for her 1st birthday below...we seem to enjoy flower themes!

Eventually one day when our daughter is grown, we want to take all the invitation designs we create for her and make a whole little book out of them that she can enjoy. 

It will be fun to see how that all turns out when the time comes, but for now we are just enjoying her being little. 

If you are interested in having something custom watercolored, don't hesitate to give us a call!

sapphire wellness

We recently had the opportunity to work with one of our long-time clients on the branding for their new business venture, Sapphire Wellness. 

We were hired to create the identity design for this new wellness program along with some accompanying collateral.

The initial idea presented by Dr. Afato and Eva about Sapphire Wellness was that the logo design should incorporate a Sapphire Hummingbird, as these birds are known for their active lifestyle, something that is embraced by the program. 

We also liked the idea that the name was also reflective of the sapphire stone, which is multi-faceted, and plays well into Sapphire Wellness' multi-faceted approach to health. 

We kept the design clean and simple, the trademarks of a good logo design. As always, Dr. Afato and Eva were a pleasure to work with. Thank you again for your business, Sapphire Wellness!

SketchCrawl

Last Saturday was the 42nd World Wide SketchCrawl. Unfortunately, we weren't able to participate in that one, however it was recently brought to my attention that I never posted Billy's sketches from the 40th World Wide SketchCrawl, so to remedy that...:)

For the 40th World Wide SketchCrawl, we decided to make the drive to San Francisco (roughly 2 hours away from our hometown). We started our day with a group of sketchers at the Ferry Building.

Here's some photos from the day...

Sketching across from the Ferry Building in San Francisco

Group Photo

And of course, some sketches!

Outside the Ferry Building, sketch by Billy 

Of course, no SketchCrawl is complete without sketching another sketcher...

Sketch by Billy from Japan Town

Because we had brought our young daughter Lily along (she had just turned 1 years old) we had decided to eventually split from the group and we went to Japan Town along with taking Lily to the ocean for the first time, and finally to Union Square before heading home. It was a such a fun, full day. Looking forward to the next one!

And, if any Yuba Sutter area people are ever interested in joining us, give us a call! We'd love to have a local group!

daystrom technology group

We are really excited to announce that Billy accepted a part time position as a graphic designer for Daystrom Technology Group!

Though Daystrom is located in Half Moon Bay, Billy will be working from home, which means we will still be maintaining the wonderful client relationships we've built through Different By Design.

2014 is already shaping up to be filled with new adventures! :)

happy new year!

Happy New Year everyone! Billy is already bringing in the new year with a bang, trying a different artistic style than his usual...the result? These fun character sketches of our favorite muse, our daughter Lily.

Here's to more change and getting out of our comfort zones in 2014!

Merry Christmas

Couldn't let the year end without designing our annual Christmas card. This year we decided to go with custom illustrations since we didn't have a current family photo (rounding up 6 people is just as much work as it sounds ;)) Thankfully Billy lovingly painted each of our little faces to produce our 2013 card.

rough sketches

love all those little faces!

final files, front & back / printed onto watercolor paper

Thank you to all of the wonderful businesses, organizations, and individuals who supported our small, local business this past year. We are so grateful to serve you. We wish you all a very Merry Christmas and we look forward to what 2014 holds. 

hope point

Thought it would be fun to post a "before and after".

Hope Point is our home church and we recently had the honor of doing some design work for the church. During the process we decided to update the church's previous logo.

We wanted to keep the same color palette and concept behind the original design, but clean up and modernize the design.

Here's the final result. The top is the before and the bottom is the after.

If you are searching for a home church, we would love to invite you to try Hope Point.

the blue umbrella

How beautiful are these "rejected" poster designs for Pixar's short film The Blue Umbrella? We love how each of these designs tells part of the story from The Blue Umbrella, though the text is minimal. It's true that a picture (or an illustration) is worth a thousand words. Often time businesses want to clutter their collateral or their advertisements with as much information as they can, but more often than not that line of thinking does more harm than good. 

"Simple can be harder than complex. You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end, because once you get there you can move mountains.” -Steve Jobs

* unsure of the poster design credits, but believe they go to graphic artist Cassandra Smolcic

let's go for a ride

So apparently we took an unexpected break from blogging because I just realized a couple of months have gone by without a post! Not to worry, we were just designing as usual and soaking up the last days of summer with our sweet children.

Nonetheless, it's time for a blog update and we're excited to share with you some recent work we created for a new film company named Let's Go For A Ride.

Let's Go For A Ride creates scenic road trip videos featuring some of the most beautiful spots in the United States.

We were commissioned to create an identity design for this company along with business cards and a DVD cover for their first film titled California Pacific Coast Highway. 

DVD design

logo design

business card design

Let's Go For A Ride wanted their branding to embrace the nostalgia of days gone by, where families enjoyed quality time together cruising along, all while enjoying the beautiful scenery.

Shelly, Chris, and Emily we had so much fun working alongside you on these projects. Thanks so much for thinking Different By Design for your business needs! We can't wait to see where your next adventure takes you!

urban sketching

property of Disney-Pixar / Up artists painting scenery

So several months back we were watching the special features for the Pixar film Up when Billy was inspired by one of our favorite artists, Ronnie Del Carmen, who had a mobile water coloring kit. Billy decided that he would like to have one, so after some quick googling to identify what Ronnie Del Carmen was using, we headed over to the only art supply store in our hometown, Michael's, to see what we could find.

While we could not find the exact same Winsor & Newton "field" kit, we did find something comparable and we ended up purchasing it (it didn't hurt that we also had one of thos Michael's 40% off coupons, either).

Since purchasing the compact water coloring set, we've been having lots of fun walking down as a family to our neighborhood park and enjoying some time outdoors.

A couple weeks ago Billy decided to paint our favorite home in the neighborhood...he plopped down in the park grass facing the home and began sketching...

We spent about an hour and a half playing at the park while Billy got everything inked in before we lost all our light and headed back home. The next day we returned for another hour or so while he began to add watercolor to it....

On the third and final day we came back and Billy completed the illustration. What was really neat was that when I had instagrammed a photo of Billy working on this, someone knew the woman who had grown up in this home (her father designed and built the home and still currently resides there) and it was actually someone that we distantly knew, and she was so sweet she actually reached out to us and offered to purchase the painting to gift to her father for Father's Day.

While Billy had initially planned on keeping this painting (we adore this home! The modern lines remind us vaguely of The Incredible's home), we were thrilled to see it go to the home owner himself.

Since picking up the compact watercoloring kit we've actually purchased a few more items to make painting on the go easier for Billy...I will have to share those fun purchases in a future blog post! 

All in all, it's been very relaxing to step away from the computer, or the iPhones, or the TV screen and go create some art in the great outdoors....even if this was just down the street from us. :) 

meg arnold photography

You may remember our friends Matt and Megan from Tandem Web Solutions? We actually did the logo design for Tandem and Matt has been our go to web guy for all our coding needs. 

Well, Matt recently accepted a wonderful job offer (still web coding) in the Bay Area and so off our friends the Arnold's went to start a new chapter in their lives. 

We are so excited that part of their new chapter includes Megan fulfilling a lifelong dream and taking her passion for photography to the professional level. 

And of course we were thrilled to create the logomark for her new business venture. Megan wanted a professional design that would be timeless and simple and so Billy go to work creating these custom letterforms for her new identity. 

We can't wait to watch her journey unfold out in the big city and you too can follow her right here. 

Congratulations to you both, Matt and Megan. Your success has been well earned and while we already miss knowing that you two are just down the street, we can't wait to visit you in your new hometown.

mother's day.

Happy Mother's Day to all the moms out there! We hope you all feel extra loved and appreciated today.

Watercolor cards I woke up to today from my husband for Mother's Day. 

SketchCrawl

Hi everyone! Yesterday, Saturday the 13th of April, was the 39th SketchCrawl and Billy participated for the first time! SketchCrawl is "a world wide drawing marathon event that gathers artists from all around the globe." It was started by Pixar storyboard artist Enrico Casarosa who also happened to directed the cute short La Luna.

We found out about this SketchCrawl through twitter the day before the event, so we already had previous commitments, however Billy did his best to sketch and watercolor wherever we were at. Feel free to follow the link to see a few pieces from the end result... and if anyone in Yuba City wants to get together for the 40th SketchCrawl in July, hit us up! The more the merrier!

Literacy Workshop Posters

Posters we designed for the Giving Voice to Children's Literature workshop sponsored by the Sutter County Children & Families Commission.

We had so much fun working on this project. We love a good challenge and with this poster we had a short deadline and we also needed a way to communicate a playful feel however we obviously did not have a license to use well known, copyrighted children's book characters...and we also didn't have a photo of the speaker, Francie Dillon to work with.

To solve this problem, we decided to just create our own little characters and we love the way the little boys (and overall design) turned out.

Once again we kept with the Sutter County Children & Families Commission color palette to reinforce their branding efforts...we kept the copy brief so the poster remains clutter free, making it easier for the reader to retain the information.

We watched some youtube videos of the speaker before we started working on this project and we just have to say that she looks like so much fun! The workshop is free and open to anyone who would like to attend.

There are countless benefits to reading to your children (expanding vocabulary, art appreciation, exercising the mind, increased concentration...etc.)...so if you have any children in your life (your own, nieces/nephews, kids you babysit...) do yourself (and them) a favor and attend this workshop!

hey, look!

That's us! We were delighted to open up our current issue of Chico Statements magazine and see a little shout out to our design business.

Thanks for the support, Chico!

louisiana oncology

Creating business identities is still one of our favorite projects to work on. Did you know since opening Different By Design we've created 23 unique business identities for different clients?

This is one of our latest logo designs for Louisiana Oncology. Louisiana Oncology needed a logo design that was simple, scalable, unique, and reflective of their state of the art, professional facility. We chose restful earth tones for the color palette to compliment their facility's interior and created a unique and memorable emblem using an abstract "L" and "O" to reinforce the initials of their business name.  

clark & conley

Seriously where has the time gone?! Are we really in November? Life and business has been moving so incredibly fast!

We were recently commissioned to design an identity for a local family owned and operated Christmas tree lot.

We had a lot of fun with these two families. Here are the two concepts we designed for them...one is more clean, modern, and playful while the other concept is more nostalgic and traditional feeling.

If you live in the Yuba Sutter area, we encourage you to shop local, support small business, and support  local families! Clark & Conley Christmas Trees will be opening on Black Friday and you can find them on Bogue Road next to North Valley Calvary Chapel. Why not make your tree a Clark & Conley? :)

promotional postcards we also designed 

well said, hank_scorpio

When looking for a designer to create a logo for your business, there are several important factors to consider when determining if you should trust the designer in question with your company's image.

While we don't discuss all those factors today, I did want to touch base on choosing a designer that will create your logo in a vector program (such as Adobe Illustrator) vs. Photoshop or another similar program.

We actually have had a good amount of design work come in from clients that had logo designs (not through us) that were not in a vector format and they not only paid another designer for that logo, they were now paying us to vectorize that logo for them so that they could actually use their logo (many printers will ask for the vector file of your logo).

Nearly every single thing we design at Different By Design is in Adobe Illustrator.

We have our own (similar..but more professional :)) explanation as to why we use Illustrator vs. Photoshop, but today I came across this little gem on the Graphic Design Form site... and um...yeah...I might just start going with what he says from now on.

Here is his response to someone who wanted to start designing logos for a living but didn't understand why he needed to learn a vector program if he could just make a big file in Photoshop:

Thanks for the laugh, Hank_Scorpio! All joking aside, he does a great job making his point.

So. When you are looking to work with a graphic designer, find one that has the capabilities and knowledge to use the right tool for the job.

tuff stuff jerky company

While Tuff Stuff Jerky Company has been around for as long as I can remember, it recently went under the new ownership of Pete Stocker.

Pete contacted us shortly after taking over and wanted to find a way to keep using the iconic "Tuffy" logo but in a refreshing, more modern, clean way.

We started out by cleaning up some of the lines on Tuffy and we played with a couple ideas Pete had...how about that cigar smoking Tuffy? :)

We then set out designing new labels for the jerky packaging. As you can see the old labels were rather gaudy and cluttered and they didn't do a good job of portraying the fact that Tuff Stuff Jerky is actually an all natural jerky, free of artificial ingredients, nitrites, and MSG.

We also wanted to make a clear distinction between flavors because there's nothing worse than accidentally buying one flavor when you wanted another because the packaging doesn't do a good job of distinguishing between different flavors!

The evolution of Tuffy.

Old label.

Picture by Sunflower Natural Foods Market, where you can purchase Tuff Stuff jerky.

Photo of the new labels we designed.

We are now currently in the process of getting a web site going for Tuff Stuff Jerky Company and getting Pete some new business cards that will match the updated look of his company. 

Thanks for thinking Different By Design, Tuff Stuff Jerky Company!

Bright Futures

We recently had the honor of working with the lovely ladies over at the Sutter County Children & Families Commission again.

We designed business cards for them several months ago and more recently they came to us for a 4'x8' banner and 6" circle postcards for a conference they are attending this month.

While we did not design their logo, we wanted to keep in being consistent with their color palette so we continued using primary colors and green in their collateral.

Probably the number one mistake we see small business owners make the most often in their marketing is not staying consistent. Everything from changing your logo colors with each new season or color trend to using multiple fonts that are not cohesive to your brand image weakens your marketing efforts.

We thoroughly enjoyed the challenge of finding a fun and playful way to continue enforcing the Bright Futures and Sutter County Children & Families Commission's branding in a refreshing way. We chose to use "block" shapes on the poster to also play off the wording of "building" bright futures and we love how the imagery and bright colors is appropriate for the audience as well as being eye catching.

You can learn more about the free services they offer through their Bright Futures program over at www.sutterkids.org