After some blueskying, I settled on four designs and scoured the net for reference images. Below you can see where I ended up.
Something featuring the cruise ship
|
It should be pretty clear to anyone looking at this page I'm not an artist or a designer. I also have essentially no drawing skills.
So, it was a no-brainer to create the designs in Adobe Illustrator. In Illustrator I could fumble at the designs endlessly until I had something I could live with. Having the artwork in Illustrator was also good because that's what I use to drive the laser engraver (more about that below). |
Again driven by my lack of drawing skills, I decided to trawl the internet for stamp designs I could use as the basis from which to create my own designs.
I've always loved the elegance of classic engraved postage stamp art, so I wanted to do something as close to that as I could within the limits of my design abilities and the production processes I intended to use for the project. Here's a slide show of reference images I found. |
|
During my internet search I discovered a few designers making art for digital stamps and some who took it all the way to production.
The designer who had the biggest impact on the project was Peter Voth of Düren, Germany. I was captivated by Peter's stylized portraits and hoped that by emulating his style, I had at least a fighting chance of making a JoCo headshot stamp that was not embarrassing. (I'll leave it to you to decide if I got there.) I also borrowed heavily from the frame design on Peter's stamp. Its features seemed more achievable at the resolution the laser when compared to the incredible details of the engraved steel plate designs used in real postage stamps. |
I'll spare you the terrifyingly bad sketches from my notebook and any view into the countless hours I spent in Illustrator and just show you the designs as they were when I deemed them good enough to go on to the next step.
All in all, I'm happy with the design concepts. I'm okay with the execution but I do wish the JoCo stamp actually looked like Jonathan Coulton. Here's hoping he never actually sees these. The designs evolved throughout the production process, but not so much as to fundamentally change any of the concepts. First iterations of the designs complete, the real work began: figuring out the processes necessary to make the stamps. |