Use your design skills for fun

and for good if ya have the means

Apr 21, 2024

Hey friends

Hope y’all are doing well and had a great weekend. I’m out in Vegas right now for a bachelor party but I made sure to get this newsletter scheduled!

graphic design should be fun

As a graphic designer it’s amazing to work on client work and be fulfilled in both a professional and monetary sense.

However, there is more to all these than Just creating stuff to benefit a great capitalist system.

We need to get our bread and work our way up in the professional world yes,

However

I think it’s mad important to use your design chops for small personal projects and things in your life that are just for fun or for others around you.

I have always been a big proponent of doing personal passion projects or little design concept series.

I practice what I preach too, checkout my hardcore alphabet series im working on, my Skatin not Stirred collage work or even the blues legends project I did!

What I’m talking about today is using your skills for small projects that are just for you or for an event or whatever.

I wanted to share a few mini projects or one-off pieces I’ve done over the past few years, starting with the most important and most recent.

01. The save the dates for my wedding!

It was so fun making these and I was a bit nervous to pull them off in a way that both me and Erika liked.

It felt good to use my design skills just for something personal in my life, not to make money, advance on social media, or benefit my professional career somehow.

They are a bit unconventional but so are my partner and I. We love hardcore, punk and alt music so I wanted to capture that flyer aesthetic in the invite.

I love how they turned out and If you want to see the entire process of the invites being made, check out my latest video!

02. Designer Trading Cards

The second thing I wanted to show was my designer trading card series.

When I’m into something I dive deep into the history and love to learn about the masters that did it before me, graphic design is no exception.

I’ve also always loved the design and collecting aspect of trading cards.

So I thought why not combine those 2 awesome things?

This project wasn’t too crazy design wise but it allowed me to honor some of my design/art heroes and practice some of my layout and design work.

I was pretty stoked with how they all turned out and I think the Saul Bass or David Carson one was probably my favorite overall

I even made an entire YouTube video about this a while back when I first posted it!

So if this mini-project sounds cool to you, I’d love if ya went and checked out the video!

Watch Here!

03. Spotify playlist covers

The last thing I wanted to chat about is one of my favorite little personal projects of all time.

The designs I made for my Spotify playlists.

For no other reason than to share the process with you all and have cool covers in my Spotify app.

I have been mainly categorizing 5 playlists in the past years

My Cuesta one which is filled with corridos music and other stuff from Mexico

My energy playlist that has all kinds of hardcore, punk, metal, and other high-energy music

My Electrick playlist which is pretty on the nose name wise but has techno, jungle and house.

And my ether playlist which has a bunch of more dreamy, enteral and shoegazey type music.

They are all different but serve a specific purpose to what I’m doing, the mood I’m in or the car ride I’m trying to create haha

It was dope making custom things for all of these and what inspired this project was actually another playlist art I made last year.

My good homie Vince and I put together this amazing playlist of boom-bap and chill workflow-style beats for “locking in”

It was called Do Not Disturb and I thought it was such an amazing curated collection of songs that it needed its own custom art.

So I designed this bad boy and was super happy with how it turned out and people online thought it was dope too.

That one single playlist art further solidified the importance of little projects like this for me and kept that spark alive for me to make more stuff in the future.

Once again check the video here if ya interested lol

Go out and have fun with your design work and make stuff, even if a client or boss isn’t telling you to.

Much love and talk soon!