Christmas Cards

Here are a few of the Christmas Cards I did this winter. I love doing stuff like this, especially when other people do the hard work and I can use their stuff! Yipee!


This was a card I did for a neighbor. We were going to do it together (so I could show her how), but things got too crazy and busy, so I just put it together for her. What a cute family!
Credits:
1st Card: Elements and paper from the blue card are from the Frosted Kit by Little Dreamer Designs.
2nd Card: Frame and ribbon are from the Whimsical Wonderland Kit by Ellie Lash (her portion). I made the green paper and then the tree overlay is from Jingle kit by vks(?)
3rd Card: The papers are from the Joy to the World Kit by Linda Cumberland. The trees were designed by Little Mrs. Liz. The stich is from the Tis the Season kit by Amanda Burns. I can't find where I got the frames from...but i didn't make them.

Web Site Samples

I've been working on a few web site ideas for our Parade sites here at work. I guess the ones we currently use are just blah, so my boss asked me to think of a few ideas that we could do instead. So that's what I've been doing over the past week or so (hour here and an hour there...taking my time so I have something to do!). Here is what I came up with. I must admit that I am very proud of myself with the brown one(picture book style). It think it looks pretty cool! The blue one has the transparency boxes over the main image, but those are only there so our flash guy knows what kind of animation we want. Let me know what you think!

More Sample Advertisements

Here are a few more recent ad samples from some of our Parade Magazines.

More Baby Announcements

Here are a few more baby announcement samples that I did today whilst I was so incredibly busy at work. Leave your comments, suggestions, opinions etc. I'd love to hear from anyone!

Marketing Samples

I am a woman of many talents! ;-) I do ads, magazines, but am also technically on the marketing staff here at BuilderFusion, Inc. So I get to do all that fun stuff as well as any marketing that we do for Builderfusion. This is really fun. I get to be a little more creative on this stuff because I usually have more time and my boss has great ideas to help push me a little. Here are a few of the things I've done for our company.
For every area that we do a Parade magazine, we also do the ad sales. So I get to design a media kit for all the sales guys to send out. This is the template I designed and we just change the colors for every area.
This was a brochure I did for a marketing idea that my boss had. The top portion is the front of the tri-fold and the bottom is the inside.

This is one of many of our customer success stories that we do and put up on our web site to show potential companies how awesome we are!! ;-)
This is one of the newest ones. We are starting to do a media kit to send out to potential national sponsors. This is just one of the pages for this.
This was a "direct mail" piece sent via e-mail to let HBA members in the Tennessee area know that Craig (our President) was going to be in town.

Magazine Samples

Not only do I do ads, but occasionally I do an entire magazine. Oooohhhh. I help out with occasional Parade of Homes magazines, but also have the EO magazine that is all mine. This magazine goes out to all Executive Officers of Home Builders Associations across the U.S. I think this is a lot of fun too, but prefer ads since I can move around from project to project rather than being stuck on one for months on end and have ads to do on the side! Magazine design is fun because it's rewarding to see an entire project/magazine that was all your own handy work! So here are a few of the covers of those magazines as well as a few pages.


This cover was a lot of fun. We took the picture of this guy reading a paper, blurred him and then got rid of all the text on his paper. Then we had to add the texture of the paper back in and make our own paper to stick on top. It was so much fun! I think it turned out pretty cool and for all the work I put in, I'm quite pleased.

Ad Samples

I figure since I am an ad designer by profession, that maybe I should post some of those samples, especially since all these samples have actually been printed. In the year that I've worked here, I'd say I've done over 200 ads (which is a lot, by the way ;-). I've done ads for companies from California, Florida, New York, Colorado, Montana, North Carolina, Oregon, Kansas and then some! We've printed over 30 magazines in 10 + different states! What a way to get your name out there (yes, my name is listed in all magazines...tee hee hee).

I like designing ads because it's quicker and I get to change things up and not being stuck on one project for long periods of time. With ads, I am constantly getting new projects to do, work on and then finish. The only bad thing about ad design is quantity. In some areas, I do 60%+ of the ads. This doesn't leave a lot of time for each ad. I was going through all our past magazines and found way too many ads that I never want anyone to see. So it is when companies send me nothing to work with (or I have no time...)

The other bad thing is when magazines overlap and I have ads in 3 or more magazines to complete. This gets rather stressful at times...and the days quickly turn into 10 hour days as opposed to 8.

So here are a few ad samples I've completed as well as a few magazine covers (ones where I designed the entire magazine) that I've also done.

More Announcement Samples

Logo Samples

Here are a few of the logos I've done in the past.

Wedding Announcement Samples

Here are a few of the wedding announcements I've done in the past. I just wanted to design my announcement for my wedding and then realized that I really enjoyed this. I continued with my little sister's and now I'm just working on samples.