Laura Slipsky

You watched the Oscars last night, tuning in early to see the red carpet and all the celebrity fashions. You had a little taste of the glamour and glitz of Hollywood. But on Monday you returned to work, turned on your computer and realized, your computer desktop was wearing last year’s fashions! Joan would tear you apart.

Save yourself from further embarrassment and download one or all of these desktop ready-to-wears.

Limoncello Ingredients Wallpaper

960 x 640 (iPhone)
1024 x 1024 (iPad)
1440 x 900
1680 x 1050

Yellow Sad Monster Wallpaper

960 x 640 (iPhone)
1024 x 1024 (iPad)
1440 x 900
1680 x 1050

Pink Sad Monster Wallpaper

960 x 640 (iPhone)
1024 x 1024 (iPad)
1440 x 900
1680 x 1050

Love Birdies Wallpaper

960 x 640 (iPhone)
1024 x 1024 (iPad)
1440 x 900
1680 x 1050

After devoting a rather long entry to Valentine’s Day and love, I felt compelled to offer the counter-argument, to balance things out. Hate, the passionate fiery emotion that can eat us up from the inside, is not exactly the opposite of love, but compelling all the same.

If you feel like you’ve been neglecting that special someone who you just hate, not giving them their due attention, hand them one of these cards. And they’ll know you’ve been thinking of them…choking on their morning coffee or finding a severed rat’s head in their cereal.

Honestly, I can’t think of any good that could come from giving these to someone, but what do I know?

Button ”I wish you were dead” PDF

Button ”Eat dirt” PDF

But wait there’s more. See the bonus…

I have created two very different valentines to share—a stricken little monster and a slightly grotesque heart. If you’re like me, and struggle with the sappy messages in many greeting cards, maybe one of my offbeat valentines will be the right fit for your special someone.

Button ”My heart is yours” PDF

Button ”Could you love a monster” PDF

So what’s the story with the monster? Long ago I sculpted a little clay gargoyle, about five inches tall. I painted him solid white. It was February. I gave him a little heart sign that said, “Could you love a monster?” and sold him at the annual Tiny Art Show at Emerge Gallery for $10. Since then, the phrase “Could you love a monster?” has stuck with me. We’ve all been at that vulnerable place in a relationship where we question whether we are ready to dive deeper into a relationship or not. It can feel like asking someone to love a monster. Gosh, isn’t love lovely, even when it’s devastating?

We all know what Valentine’s Day has become, a competition of who can send and receive the most embarrassing amount of flowers and gifts to their significant other at work. I don’t think any holiday is required to express how you feel to a person, but if having a day marked on a calendar inspires people to step outside their comfort zone and take that risk, I’m all for that. I’m a romantic, really.

Continue on to see a tutorial on making the cards, plus a BONUS…

Before I started my career in graphic design, I spent almost two decades cultivating a love for hands-on crafts. Yes, I’m counting all those macaroni and construction paper projects of my childhood. And doing craft projects makes me feel like a kid again.

I picked up a bare wood birdhouse from a craft store. I thought the shape of it was really cute, and any fan of Portlandia knows that things are better with a bird on it. Following this logic, I figured birdhouses must not be far behind. (Full disclosure: This is the only thing I know about Portlandia.)

Flowers, hearts and stars, oh my! Originally I had planned on covering the entire thing in line drawings and patterns, but I liked how this looked. It sat in this state for a while before I decided it was, in fact, done. Sometimes more is more, but I think this is a case of less is more.

About five years ago I painted a series of oil still lifes on 6x6x1″ blocks of wood. After some coats of crystal clear (not an archival method, btw) and fabric backing, they’ve been looking awesome in my powder room for the past several years.

Below you can see the close-ups of each painting. If you’re wondering what you’re looking at, just hover your mouse over each image to see the photos of the real life inspiration.

redleaf

In college I could see a maple tree out my dorm window and I’d watch it change colors through the seasons. This is a leaf from that tree.

wood

I copied the grain from an unused square. Imagine my joy when I realized I still had the real piece of wood five years later.

iron

Detail from a candle holder

jar

A little collection of beads and shiny things

bag

Study of a striped fabric purse

shell

Beads, shell and shiny things

cellphone

Some things change, but just a little.

vase

Study of red glass

P.S. Thank you to Jenna Gengler for teaching me how to make sprite hovers.

Remember how we all used to watch the Behind the Music documentaries? There’s something fascinating about learning what happened behind the polished result. Well consider this a blog version, where we go behind the scenes of a liqueur.

My good friend Kelly, decided she wanted to make limoncello and give it away as gifts for Christmas. Fortunately for her, she decided this about three months before Christmas because that’s how long it took to infuse lemon zest into alcohol. After a lot of work and even more time, Kelly filtered and bottled half of the batch and was ready for the holidays.

With so many steps and so much planning going into these homemade gifts, I couldn’t resist making a chart of the process.

Each bottle had 312 hours in it. That’s almost an hour per ounce. And in case your BS radar is going off, yes only half the batch was filtered and bottled, so assuming it takes another eight hours to filter the rest, and another hour to bottle, that would bring down the average per bottle to 157 hours. That’s still a lot of time!

In addition to helping Kelly make her limoncello by scrubbing the lemons and filtering the rum through my Brita, I gave it a name and designed the labels. The name Four Goldens Limoncello came from the fact that Kelly has four golden retrievers—Gatsby, whose favorite toy is a green bone; Mike, the laid back chow mix; Maddie, the happiest girl in the world; and then there’s Lawrence, he sort of defies explanation.

I made four little lemon-head dog cartoons, each one representing one of the goldens. Gatsby has his trademark green bone.

Below are three label ideas at an early stage. I showed these to Kelly and she picked the one she liked the most. She saw right away that her dogs were on the label. It made her happy, which made me happy.

I developed the design into a full label, making it look as professional as I could, even including details such as how many milliliters and ounces the bottle held. Kelly wanted to have a little joke on the label, so I wrote some unnecessary instructions, “It’s liquor. Drink it.”

Now for a little behind-the-scenes of the behind-the-scenes. As you see, I have a very fancy photo studio, and a highly-trained assistant…I know it looks like a piece of poster board and kitty cat.

He’s so helpful.

When you spend 40 hours a week at a computer, you long for some hands on activities, and sometimes a good old fashioned craft project is just what the doctor ordered.

Last year I found two unpainted wooden toys at the store and decided to turn them into Christmas ornaments for my two nephews. I knew at 2 and 4 years old they wouldn’t appreciate them yet, but one day they would. I felt like one of Santa’s elves as I sanded out all the rough spots on a wooden train and a wooden propeller plane, and then lovingly painted each one and put their initials on them.

About a month ago my niece was born. What do you get for a month old baby who already has everything? It was perfect timing to make another ornament and continue the tradition. There are three of them now, that makes it a tradition, right?

I found a cute little wooden bird cutout with a wing detail at the craft store. It came pre-printed with some details on it, coloring book style, but after I primed it with gesso, they were all covered up. I winged it, no pun intended. (Okay, it was intended.) Each side is slightly different, with a lot of dots. I busted out some toothpicks for those. Doesn’t get much more arts and craftsy than that.

Just a simple and sweet little project.

What do you do when a project you worked made you smile while working on it? I think you should find a reason to work with those things again. I couldn’t help smiling while drawing some cute dinosaurs for a project. But by the time the project was all done, not all of these party-goers were needed. I didn’t want them to feel sad since they didn’t get invited to that party, so I gave them a reason for existing–wallpapers!

Party all day long with my dinosaurs, just download them from the newly created Downloads page and put them on your computer desktop, your iPhone, even your iPad.

Enjoy!

A couple of months ago my friend, Andrea, approached me about designing a poster for the organization for which she is currently President of the Board, Trips for Kids – Triangle (TFKT). This is the local branch of a national non-profit. Trips for Kids works with at-risk youth to improve their education and rewards those who have made improvements with monthly bike rides. The local branch is funded, in part, by the non-profit bike shop, Grassroots Bikes, located in Durham, NC. The shop is run entirely by volunteers, and the kids even help out there.

To grab the attention of the youth of Durham, TFKT had already used some graffiti elements in existing items, and has graffiti murals inside Grassroots Bikes. Inspired by this approach, I used some of the colors from those murals and incorporated graffiti arrows, ink splatters and textures in with bicycles and gears, as well as a photograph from TFKT’s collection.

It turned out to be a bold, fun poster for a great cause.

Here at the credit union we just launched an internal site for employees. It’s called the Hub. Hopefully it will be the first place employees will go to find office forms, see photos from company events, learn about company news and find lots more things—sorta be at the center of things…get it?

To promote the launch of this site, we used a guerrilla marketing technique to create buzz. For three days leading up to the launch we posted tons of flyers in the shared areas of our office suites. There was a different design for each day. At night we took down the old one and put up the new one, so each morning employees were greeted with a different humorous, and somewhat vague, message about the Hub. Without going into details, it sure did create buzz! People wanted to know what the Hub was.

I think my favorite is one with an employee’s photograph that had been censored; black bar over the eyes type of censorship, though it was still clear who the person was, with a graphic of a koala hanging on the side of the photo. The copy teased that you could find out who secretly wants a koala as a pet by reading the employee spotlight on the Hub. Just fun stuff there.

On the morning the site launched, employees came into work and found a black mug with M&Ms waiting for them on their desks, and an email in their inbox letting them know the Hub was alive!

To give the mugs some flair and go outside the curling ribbon norm, I came up with a paper insert that looked like the Hub’s logo was in some cappuccino foam, and a “spoon” gave it some vertical dimension. There were several messages on the spoons, “There’s a latte going on,” “Stir things up at the Hub,” and “Your new daily fix.”

Each insert was cut out by hand and kept in place by a tube of paper nestled among the M&Ms in the mug. As I worked on the prototypes, I kept fooling myself and reaching for a sip of coffee that was really just paper. Friend and coworker, Ed took some pretty nice shots of it, which he allowed me to use. (Thank you, Ed!)

Everyone seems pretty pleased with their mugs of candy. I’m calling this launch a success.