P I X A R...

Because dreams really do come true! :)

Last month we had the awesome and unique privilege of an inside tour of the world famous animation studios at Pixar.

We were so blessed to be invited as guests of a Pixar employee, Shaun, and his lovely wife Laura and their two sweet children.

To say our whole family loves Pixar would be a vast understatement. To be able to get a peek inside of this amazing world where creativity is king in the workplace...well, it was really a dream come true. The whole trip was so inspiring and reinforced our love for Pixar even more (if that's even possible). There were so many highlights and Shaun and Laura both were so knowledgeable, that it made for a fabulous time.

Here's a few pictures from the day.

After walking through the entrance of the main building, this seating area is to the left.

Wish I could have taken Guido home with me!

I am in love with all the huge art work that was hung all throughout the buildings. Everything was so perfectly detailed. Here is Mater from Cars 2 to the right of the main building entrance.

"The claw is our master.." Isaac making friends with the infamous Toy Story aliens.

I'll be sure to post again with more pictures from our Pixar trip. I think it was the highlight of my summer. Thank you Shaun, Laura, and family!

adventure is out there!

We are huge Pixar fans and I have to say that the Pixar film "Up" just might be my all time favorite movie they have produced.

The movie opens up showing how a boy named Carl (the main character) and Ellie (his soon to be future wife) meet as children and fall in love. Both Carl and Ellie have a love for adventure and after being unsuccessful in starting a family, Carl decides to take Ellie to South America to fulfill her lifetime dream of going to Paradise Falls. Though as often is the case, "life happens" and they quickly need to dip into their "Paradise Falls" savings to pay for house and car repairs and so forth...Finally, when an elderly Carl is actually able to buy tickets, Ellie passes away and they never make it to Paradise Falls together.

In the opening sequence as they tell Carl and Ellie's love story we see Ellie placing a painting she did of her and Carl's home resting by Paradise Falls on the mantel of their fireplace.

When we decided to have Billy paint something for the studio, replicating this painting jumped into both of our minds.

Not only is the movie sentimental to us, the painting represents one of the underlying themes of Up and that is that "Adventure is out there!".

As we begin our adventure of being self employed, and honestly, the only studio of our kind in Yuba City, California, the painting serves as a great reminder to enjoy every bit of this journey.

Instead of painting Carl and Ellie's home by the falls, we decided to paint what represents our "dream" and that was to open a design studio, and we did it! Yay! (with the grace of God and support of our family, friends, and clients, of course!). So, resting next to the falls in our depiction is the building that houses our design studio.

Billy spent hours working away on this and it turned out absolutely beautiful. Though it was finished in time for the opening, we didn't have it hanging up at that time, so I snapped the top photo shortly after the opening.

I love having Billy's artwork up in the studio...his illustration and fine art skills largely separate him from other designers and I think that most people have a misconception that designers simply move around clipart and text and they don't realize that designers worth their time and money are actually true artists; the computer doesn't create designs (in our case), the designer does! The computer is simply another tool...like a paintbrush :)

Every time I look up in the studio and see this, I can't help but smile and wonder what our journey holds!

connecting the dots

In a powerful speech given by Apple Inc. cofounder and chief executive Steve Jobs said,“You have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future."

So today I am blogging the first entry of Connecting The Dots; an ongoing series you will find here on the Different By Design blog. Brace yourself! I'll try to be brief but I don't want to leave out too much!

What many people do not realize is that apart from all the work we do at Different By Design, we also have other huge and time consuming responsibilities. Billy is a manager at Sam's Club where he works 50 plus hours a week. We have 3 young children that do not attend day care (though one does go to school) but I am the primary caregiver of them 365 days a year. As if we weren't busy enough, last summer I started making hair pieces for my younger sisters and then literally that hobby turned into a business that just took off.

They say when you start a business it takes around 3 years to become profitable. However, with hair pretties they were an overnight success. Originally I started out giving one to anyone that asked about them because I wasn't planning on starting a business. After I gave away over $400 (my cost) in hair accessories I knew something had to change! So in a blink of an eye I suddenly had another business to operate.

Because other than raising our children and Sam's Club, our main goal has always been to focus on the growth and the maintaining of excellent service to our clients at Different By Design, I began to force myself to slow down on making hair pretties. Some of these steps included not going the usual route of opening up a full time etsy shop and turning down offers of being carried in stores. I also chose to move the hair pretties facebook page from a public page to a private one so I could better control the communications between hair pretties and my wonderful customers.

These last few months have felt like we have had 0 free time as a family. After putting in over 10 hours a day at Sam's, Billy is home and I am briefing him on where we are at with all our clients and design jobs. After that everyone is off to bed and then I am up into the early hours of morning fulfilling dozens of hair pretties orders! I made a resolution in 2011 to change that and to limit the amount of orders I am taking.

I finally got to the point where I was ready to announce that I was taking a hair pretties sabbatical when I went in to accept a new friends request on the hair pretties facebook page. It was from a man and I assumed it was on behalf of his wife. I decided to visit his his facebook page since it is far and few between when men are putting in friends request to hair pretties!

I saw that he had listed Pixar (yes..that amazing animation studio that we have to thank for Up, Toy Story, Cars, The Incredibles and every other amazing children's movie in existence) as his employer.

I sent him a quick message thanking him for the friends request and mentioned that my kids were going to think I was a celebrity since a Pixar employee was a friend to hair pretties!

To wrap up that encounter, the Pixar employee's lovely wife who was referred by another favorite hair pretties' customer Natalie (she graduated Chico State with Billy) ended up ordering some hair pretties for their adorable little girl and her husband later wrote back to say that though they were busy now with Cars 2 preparing to release, he invited us to come down and meet his family and...tour the Pixar Studio!

I nearly died when I read his message! When Billy was a student at Chico State he had the honor of touring a couple of top notch design firms...we were recently discussing how we would LOVE to tour some true creative studios but weren't sure how to go about doing that.

Then just like that, all because I started selling hair accessories we had an invitation from a Pixar employee to tour their studio. In our eyes, Pixar is king of creativeness...to think we are going to get to actually visit their work space and environment is truly a dream come true.

                                                                                     
And while I absolutely LOVE all my hair pretties customers, I do still plan to announce a break from hair pretties soon. However, I am so thankful to God for connecting those dots. When I "started" hair pretties it was (and for the most part still is) really something I did just for fun.

I would have never dreamed in a million years that hair pretties would have provided an opportunity for us to visit the Pixar Animation Studios, but I feel incredibly blessed it worked out that way.

SO. Though we don't always realize it when we are going about our day to day lives, I fully believe that there is a reason for everything and that in hindsight we will be amazed how the dots in our lives connected. Did you know that Steve Jobs also cofounded Pixar? How's that for dot connecting! :)

*second photo of the Pixar Animation Studio found on techeblog.com