Confession: I have an addiction to creativity.

My need to be creative in every aspect of my life can be a bit overwhelming at times, and leaves me feeling a tad overworked yet never under-inspired.

I don’t do boredom well. Or at all.

Personally, though I work full-time and freelance my butt off, I also love to take on personal side projects (Twin Peaks quote posters coming soon!), decorate my home with so many colors and textures it looks like a clown threw up, bake elaborate lattice-laced desserts, design my square foot garden and download killer apps for my phone that allow me to pimp out my Instagram photos.

Ladies and gents, if you’ve ever thought to yourself, “Gee, I sure wish I could put a typographic treatment on my photos on my phone,” then I have an app for you! House Industries, also known as “the best type foundry there is,” developed this nifty, free Photo-Lettering app that allows you to do just that.

Though you could pay for some of their drool-inducing fonts ($0.99 a pop) they do offer four fonts for free. However, I refuse to pay for things like parking, cable TV shows, and apps, so the free fonts will have to suffice. For now.

It all began with a spunky, go-getter named Mindi quickly became known in her field as the speedy, social, “get it done” girl on her social marketing team. Because she gets uber-focused when she works, she began hashtagging #mindizone on Twitter. From there, she knew she had the name for her show.

The goal of her show is to focus on the psychological, ideation, strategic, behind-the-scenes of social media marketing. To illustrate her concept, an organized grid of social media icons in diffused grey lie in the background (literally “behind-the-scenes”) conveying immediately to user what this show will be about. To fit the audience of Gen Y/Z, we went with some youthful, modern-yet-retro fonts and used primary colors to mimic what large social networks use.

As with most new webshow hosts, Mindi’s main concern was that she wanted to establish credibility early on. We decided to include a section on the left of the video that shows a compelling testimonial from someone that endorses her and her work, as well as a section near the footer containing a row of logos for companies/people she’s worked for.

The Mindi Zone was a blast to work on, and on a personal note, Mindi herself is an absolute delight! She’s direct, concise and oh so much fun! Should you need some sweet social media skills, do yourself a favor and check her out ASAP. You’ll be so glad you did!

You know what’s awesome? Beer. (A strong part of me wants to end this blog post with just that statement, but no. I’ll carry on!)

Well, a few weeks ago I was contacted by Mike Stone, a fellow Oregonian and freshly turned 30 year old in the process of starting up a microbrewery with the plans of graduating someday to a brew pub. The name of his company is 360 degrees, calling attention to his concept of bringing beer back to its roots and brewing in the way it was originally intended.

He needed a logo to begin his endeavor, and I was just the girl for the job. After some initial discussion, questionnaire process, and finding out what his top five favorite breweries are (a totally normal line of questioning!) I began the design process.

Because the tagline is “Bringing Beer Back to its Roots” it made sense to alter the “360″ to mimic a compass to convey the idea that the beer is a guide, pointing to its Northwest birthplace. Additionally, since the theme is about brewing beer from its historical roots, I chose fonts and design embellishments that are nostalgic and feel old world-y. They’re timeless, decorative and unique, conveying a vintage, old-timey look.

Happily, Mike picked the logo that I wanted him to (I always silently route for my favorites to be chosen) which made me one happy designer. Naturally, I celebrated the completion of our project with a beer from a place that Mike and I both have in our top five favorite brewery lists: Hopworks Urban Brewery. Cheers, Mike!

As some of you know, I work full-time here at Rains | Birchard Marketing in drizzly Portland, Oregon. In fact, next Monday will be my 3-year anniversary! Perhaps I’ll bake cupcakes to celebrate? Err… Shouldn’t someone else bake me cupcakes? Buuuuut, do I trust these three dudes’ baking skillz?

Decision made. I’LL bake cupcakes. Clearly.

Anywho, when I first started, the agency was called Rains Marketing. However, in early 2012, Account Manager Matthew Birchard became part-Owner with Jon Rains, and the new company name was born. Wanting something vibrant and full of energy, rich yellows and oranges swirl together and overlap in subtle gradients, revealing a backwards lowercase “r” (for “Rains”) emerging from the lowercase “b” (for “Birchard”) representing a union and partnership between the two Owners of the agency.

Awww… The bro-mance continues.

Back in November I entered the Brands of the World 2012 Logo Design Competition and today they FINALLY announced the winners! Turns out, this l’il beauty nabbed the silver award for the Business & Consulting category! Not too shabby if I say so myself. I’d like to thank The Academy…

You guys! You know how I LOVE my job being a Graphic Designer? And how my absolute PASSION is helping small businesses and entrepreneurs look good and get the results they deserve?

Well, as of today, I was able to combine all of that WITH CAKE.

Today, I met my new client Judy Reese from Dream Cakes, a wedding cake baker located in SE Portland. In addition to gathering some materials so I can begin redesigning her website, she surprised me with some cake she wanted me to try! Though it’s not a requirement for freelance clients to bake me cakes, it is awfully nice. Also? I should revise my terms and conditions…

Finally, my dreams have come true, and apparently it tastes like chocolate cake with chocolate fudge frosting with homemade toffee on top.

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It’s no secret that I’m a huge Twin Peaks fan. Or, that I dress up as Nadine Hurley on a semi-regular basis.

(What? Eye patches are FUN.)

So, when the time came for my jackass Twin Peakers and I to finally go on our long awaited Twin Peaks roadtrip, you can rest assured that we kiiiiiiiiiiinda lost our minds over the course of the weekend. And rightfully so. We made David Lynch proud!

So, here’s our love story, nay, our tribute to all things Twin Peaks! Enjoy!

P.S. Yes. The three of us are ARE wearing matching Twin Peaks sweatshirts with a map of the fictional Twin Peaks town on the back. Design-nerd bonus? The fonts used on this are called “Cooper.” As in, Agent Dale Cooper. Well done, Threadless designer. Well done.

Dearest Internets, I present: The McGuire’s 2012 Annual Tacky Holiday Photo!

If there’s one thing I love to do around the holidays, it’s taking a tacky photo with the Hubs, dropping some mad Photoshop skillz, and offending everyone I know via Facebook. There’s just nothing like a good bevel and emboss layered on top of golden gradients, outer glows and some old time-y typography. It just? Well, it warms my heart.

And because Hubs and I have been doing this sort of thing since 2009, people kiiiiiiiiiiinda get obsessed with predicting what we’ll do next. We’re basically a HUGE deal.

So this year, since we now have an amazing little dog, we knew we had to make the photo all about the her to exploit the cuteness/make fun of ourselves for how much we love to dress her up and make her do cute things.

It just doesn’t get more offensive than this, folks: Comparing your little dog to Jesus. However, I do think that the hilarity strongly outweighs the blasphemy.

And for good measure, here are some previous year’s photos, too. You’re welcome, internet.

I think we all know these people, right? You know, the ones that wear matching white turtle necks, pose in impossibly uncomfortable positions, and are just a liiiiiiiiiittle too into Christmas? Also, in case you were wondering, this photo shoot did, in fact, result in wreath-rash. Just so you know.

Clearly this was the year of the Snuggie and making fun of my nemesis Thomas Kinkade. Yes, I deliberately smeared lipstick on my teeth, and indeed, those are Christmas trees in our pupils.

And here we have the card that started it all. It has everything: Poor use of clipping paths, wretched vest/turtle neck combinations, festive mugs, nerdy hair/make-up, a happy feet penguin, and winter wonderland backdrop with holly border. There’s so many glows, drop shadows and inconsistent lighting treatments that I giggled and snorted my way through designing this atrocity. ‘Tis the season, indeed.

If there’s one thing I don’t talk enough about in general it’s my extreme love of all things Twin Peaks.

Though technically I was alive when Twin Peaks was on the air, I was but the ripe old age of 8 and clearly not allowed to watch this beloved show, for it was past my bedtime and scary as hell. (Thanks, Mom and Dad! Solid parenting!)

However, thanks to my boyfriend Netflix, I’ve been able to watch this as an adult and fall in love with it as if it were still on the air. Even better, I was able to watch it with my best, two jackass design friends who love it just as much as I do, thus solidifying our friendship for all of eternity.

To celebrate our one year, Twin Peaks Lady-versary, we decided to take ourselves out to dinner, lady-date style. And, since tradition clearly dictates that first anniversaries get a paper gift, I could think of nothing better than to custom design a typographic Twin Peaks quote poster.

This is dedicated to my Twin F*ckin’ Peakers: Long live TFP!!!

Green Leaf Irrigation & Landscape consists of a pair of life long friends, opening their own business here in Portland, Oregon, and needed all the necessary materials to appear legit. With an eye for design themselves, they wanted a logo that would illustrate the holistic nature of their business in a clever way.

To address this, I utilized the design of a yin-yang symbol, where a water droplet and leaf intertwine to convey the connectivity of proper irrigation yielding “greener” landscapes.

Based on the circular logo, we decided round business cards would be the best way to go to carry the theme throughout other print materials. Using Greenerprinter.com, all materials were printed on recycled paper, using sustainable practices.

If there’s one thing I love, it’s color. And as most of my outfits suggest, I make it my personal mission to shove, jam and otherwise drape myself in the stuff whenever possible.

Ya know what else I love? Running races where costumes are encouraged and beer is consumed. So, when The Facebooks started to light up with rumblings of a totally doable 5K involving frolicking through magical color dust, I couldn’t wait to start recruiting my fellow design friends to form a team ASAP. I mean, seriously. Just LOOK at this montage? How could anyone NOT want to do this? Good job, Marketing!

Naturally, we had to decide on a team name worthy of a herd of Graphic Designers so we could all register together. We had several ideas:

• The Rainbow Bites (which I may or may not use as my future roller derby name, so back off Internetz. It’s MINE.)
• The CMYKs
• The RGBee Gees
• Dot Gain & The Gamuts
• and many, many more

Dot Gain & The Gamuts won by a landslide, and though we had intended to make quirky t-shirts with 1950′s-style illustrations of a she-bop group complete with halftones and other design-related nerd-ery, we remembered that we all work full-time and didn’t have time.

Finally, race day came, and we ran in outfits as any respectable group of 30-somethings would: with lots of pigtails and adult tutus. We laughed, we danced to “Call Me Maybe”, and we tormented others around us to trade our color dust for theirs. (Almost all of us had GREEN in our packets! And not a cool shade of green either, just a standard dark grassy green. BOO!!!)

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All in all, it was a great experience that I would love to do again, if not just to blow my nose afterward and see so many cool colors come out.