August Empress

I am so excited I can hardly contain it! After two years of always planning to redesign my own site (I think every designer will understand), I have finally created a site that I absolutely love and am so proud of. I feel like the essence of me, who I am as a designer, and where I want to take my business is living in these pages – please go take a look and let me know what you think!

Amongst the excitement is a little bit of sad news however… after a particularly quite couple of months I have decided I will no longer be blogging at August Empress. I’ve  enjoyed building this blog over the last two years and connecting with so many lovely readers that it was a difficult decision, 2013 has other plans for me to focus on other (fabulous) projects.

All the content will remain on the blog so if you need a hit of inspiration you can still look through all the archives from the past two years.

It’s not all sad news though, I have created a little space over on my website – The Journal – where I will be occasionally sharing designs, illustrations and thoughts about work and life, so I do hope you join me over there. You can subscribe to the rss feed to receive all the latest entries.

I hope 2013 has been amazing for you so far (it’s already going so fast!), it’s farewell for me here – but hello to exciting new changes!

A while ago I created a blog post featuring some lovely Floral Fonts that could be used in a design, and today I have sourced some gorgeous examples of fonts with illustrative elements and drawings (also known as dingbats) that you may find useful. I can imagine the cooking illustrations looking fab as tools and ingredients in recipe posts: Ride my Bike Dingbat / Knitting and Sewing Doodle / LiebeCook / Vintage Wedding / Coffee and Tea Doodles / Royal Oak Decor / Reading and Writing Doodles / Antique Macabre Ornaments / Diva Doodles Too / Fruit and Veggie Doodles

Over the last few years there have been some incredible Pengiun classics cover redesigns by designers like Coralie Bickford-Smith (I particularly love her culinary themed book covers) and I was fascinated to read about a new Penguin Drop Caps collaboration between illustrator Jessica Hische and Paul Buckley. This will be a 26-book series of hardcover classics, each one feature a unique drop cap that Jessica is well known for through her project Daily Drop Cap. Judging by the first six covers, I would imagine that the whole set together will create a full rainbow of colour.

Let me introduce a new series I am having on the blog, where each fortnight on Friday I will share a creative design related video. I’ve featured Dana Tanamachi’s work previously on the blog here and here, and for the first Friday Footage video here’s an amazing timelapse video where Dana creates the chalk artwork that will appear on the Nagging Doubt Viognier wine label.

There are a few more timelapse video’s from Dana showcasing her talent on her Vimeo page.

I’m excited to share with you the latest amazing offering from Going Home to Roost‘s blog author Bonnie Forkner. Bonnie has recently launched the Roost Tribe, a monthly membership that provides exclusive downloads, freebies, and other fun resources and content!

Each month members receive 2 seamless repeating patterns, 10 graphics, 1 adobe illustrator video tutorial, 1 guided step-by-step video tutorial, 1 printable greeting card with matching gift cards, a monthly round up of favourite links, resources & websites, 1 iPhone and matching desktop calendar, a monthly gift guide with coupons and special offers, 1 special topic article and anything else Bonnie feels like including as a bonus.

All this for only $5/month, what’s not to love. Below is just a sneak peek of last month’s goodies, sign up today in time to start receiving all the October goodies.

Above is just a small example of all the amzing patterns created by Ashley Goldberg, I love the hand made feel of paint stroked and pencil lines, the rawness and feminine colour palettes.

You can check out Ashley’s Flickr and blog for more pattern goodness as well as paintings and illustrations. She also has some of her illustrative prints on sale in her Etsy shop.

After coming across these beautiful bulbs now I dream about having randomly scattered diamond lights throughout rooms in my house.