Free 2018 Calendar Download!

It's the season of giving, so I made this little calendar available to download for free. It has some original Charmellow artwork about traveling on it to inspire you the whole year through. 

Tell your friends! Happy Holidays! 

FREE DOWNLOAD

Posters for Locally Grown 8

Let's make something! 

I had a super fun summer of making things for fun people! A local vocal power house and amazeballs lady I know from Cadillac, Rachael Davis asked me to make her some posters. I obliged and what ensued was a bunch of good clean fun. 

The concert is the eighth installation of a series called "Locally Grown" that invites people that came from Cadillac High School to come back and perform their songs with the orchestra. 

Rachael is a literal singing angel that will bring you to tears. Its happened to me many times. Maybe I'm a cry baby, maybe not. So I'm jumping way ahead but the concert was amazing. I sat there and remembered all the band concerts I performed on the very high school auditorium stage I was watching. It was incredibly nostalgic and sweet. 

In hind site incredibly humbling to make art for. 

So back up to before the concert, cause, you know I was printing them that day. Rachael came over to my house and HELPED ME PRINT THEM. How fricken cool is that? Its cool. Really cool. So anyway I loved every minute and am incredibly lucky to make design for people I admire so much. 

Charmellow is Handmade

As the title says, Charmellow Design is very much homegrown, down to earth, handmade company. I started it myself, I make everything myself. But what I do in graphic design land is very much inspired by what I make at home.

I’m constantly creating things. I don’t spend a lot of daylight hours watching TV or relaxing. I actually can’t relax, I’ve learned. I feel best when I am using my hands, doing something. Using my brain at least engaged in a game. I have a dining room at home that is the headquarters to weekly Collage Night, and a table full of crafty stuff just waiting to be put to use. 

I have drawn, colored and collaged from an early age like many artists I know. In high school I took “art class,” photography and newspaper. At community college I took life drawing, printmaking, perspective drawing and advertising classes. At art school, heh, I feel like I got to take almost all of the “holy grail” classes I could imagine. My all time favorite was Book Arts which involved a ton of awesome, I want all of them, printing techniques. I still love making books so much. 

So this story is dedicated to that, and shamelessly plugging the Etsy shop where I sell my one of a kind pieces. I cut, fold, punch holes and sew every book completely by hand. In Michigan. Where winter is long and cold. Just kidding, its not really THAT ominous... 

The reason this is important to what I do for businesses that hire me to do graphic design, is because designing things is truly a way of life for me. I make books, screen print posters, carve my own stamp ideas for printing, draw almost every day… For fun. I love the arts. I love creating meaning and bringing life into lines and brushstrokes. 

If you think about it, that’s what graphic design does for business, too. When I am making a logo for someone, I’m researching and learning about their business. I am learning the ins and outs, the goals, passions and favorite colors. I am tapping into what makes that business unique, and then I am telling everyone that story with their identity system. I am making a logo that is bursting with the who, what and why of your company. 

Story telling is what its all about. I believe that the books I make, the logos, the websites I’ve made and the posters I labor over tell the story of who I am. A story teller. 

Here are some pics of some of my favorite books I’ve made recently. And click HERE for my Etsy shop.