A Friend of Mine/ Design & Branding

A Friend of Mine is a holistic design firm based in Melbourne, Australia. I love how they seamlessley blend modern digital design with the handmade or "crafty" aesthetic. For one job they employed a weaver to create a design for Wired magazine, for another they researched traditional Italian and Japanese paper marbleing for a wedding invitation. This is the kind of place graphic designers dream of. Pure genius!

A birthday poster made for local printer Alain Pool


A poster created for Lumen a multi-faith centre for worship in London, designed by Theis & Khan Architects. The text is laser cut into the image so that you can look at the photograph out of direct light and the text in direct light.


A brand image for "The Earing Festival" sponsored by jewelry shop Glitzern made with layers of colored paper.


A Friend Of Mine was invited by Wired magazine to take part in their monthly custom of illustrating the edition number. They collaborated with weaver Carla Grbac to create a one-off hand woven rug. "The rug, taking over 150 hours to weave, is an exploration of how traditional crafts can have a role in design."

Brand identity for ‘Skin + Bones’, an exhibition focusing on the parallels between fashion and architecture. String art from the '70s was the inspiration, a craft which merged both fashion elements (thread) and architectural foundations (pins).


Packaging design for the Modern Flower Co., a high-end chain of London flower shops.


Brand identity for Carla Grbac, a weaver. Her logo was created to mimic the look of a piece of woven cloth.

Craft Stylish Tote Bag Challenge

Do you have some serious crafty skills? Then hop on over the Craft Stylish and enter their "Tote-ally Craft Bag Challenge". All you have to do is make or embellish and amazingly crafty tote bag, post it on the site and you could win an amazing prize of over $250 in crafty goodness.The deadline to enter is July 31. Click here for more info.

And it keeps on going...

More fun stuff made with this Ebay fabric! It's the fabric that keeps on giving. So far I have made Cd covers, a bag and a bunch of patchwork. Someone suggested a little jacket next. I think that would be pretty cool.

I made this fabric box for this month's Department of Craft Challenge. The theme was "contain". It took a while to figure out how to make this especially because I had no pattern or real plan of how I was going to make this thing. I scrapped the first two prototypes before I happened upon this design and I really like it.

More Craft Challenges

Here are a couple more examples from the November Department of Craft Challenge, the concept being "light".

Enid Crow made notepaper featuring old fashioned ladies with lightbulbs over their heads. So sweet!! It's a perfect image for an idea or list notepad.
Adam made a lamp out of a used CD spindle. He printed an image out on a transparency and when the lamp is lit, the image glows. It's so cool looking!

Process

I always like to hear about how people come up with their ideas and what their crafty process is so I documented the process of one of my most recent projects. The deadline for our November Department of Craft Challenge (light) was looming and I had nothing. Light is such a large concept; I had far too many ideas and no clue where it was going to go next. I wanted to make something more functional than the last challenge and, since I have such a well-documented love affair with lamps, I thought, "why not make another one"?
I love chandeliers but I really can't afford one so I thought about what I could make a chandelier out of. I've seen the images of chandeliers on lamp shades before but I wanted to take it a little bit further and the idea of the trompe l'oeil chandelier was born.

So here is the chandelier from start to finish. I cut out a chandelier image to make a stencil. This was a little toughh because stencils are always more complicated than they seem. Next, I covered a plain lampshade with vintage fabric and stenciled the chandelier on the covered shade.
What is this next crazy picture, you ask? Well, I needed to figure out a way to dip crappy pearls into paint and not get it all over the floor. I covered my bathroom floor with a trash bag and then hung a hook off the edge of the sink. The drying pearls dripped back into the paint can.
I attached the pearls all around the shade with wire and then made some faux crystal drops with fabric. The faux crystals are two diamonds sewn with the right sides together and turned out. I hung these with wire too.
It was really fun to flex my crafty brain and try some new techniques. Next time, I will be a little neater in my execution but all in all, a successful undertaking!
Do you have any crazy projects or ideas you are cooking up?