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