Can I be real with you for a minute? Can I be real with you.

Today is my wife’s birthday, so it seems an appropriate time to post this new work to the portfolio: the collateral material for our wedding. Emma and I recently celebrated our first anniversary and already the wedding day seems so long ago.

For a graphic designer, getting to design all the collateral material for your own wedding is not only a dream job, but a prerequisite for getting engaged.

You can see all of the wedding material by clicking here, but I wanted to pull out a couple of highlights:

These were our bridal shower invites — what we really wanted for our wedding gift was an Apple MacBook Pro for Emma’s school and work use, so my mom threw Emma an apple-themed shower. There were apples to eat, apple-oriented recipes exchanged, Apples to Apples the card game, and Apple gift cards donated. I designed the trademark-infringing invite with our wedding green across a lineart MacBook — I think it turned out pretty fun.

One of our mandates was to keep everything as cheap as possible. Printing and shipping costs add up fast when you’re inviting about 300 people to anything. Our invitation was a simple two-sided oversize postcard, featuring an illustration by yours truly on the front and all the relevant info on the back. An RSVP card and SASE rounded out the ensemble, all fitting in a large envelope that just barely qualified as regular single-stamp postage. Cheapskate success!

Months after the wedding, when we received our thousands of pictures, Emma and I collaboratively designed a hefty photo book (200 pages!) for ourselves, our family, and posterity. I have to give a shout out to our talented photographer friends — Rachel Nelson, Brooke Littell, and their husbands all did a killer job shooting our wedding, and this book really proves that. That cover shot is to die for! We gave copies of the book to our parents for Christmas last year and they were pretty blown away.

Speaking of collaboration, I suppose I should mention that Emma and I are about to begin our greatest collaborative work yet:

We are in the third trimester now; our son, Tycho Maximus Peat, will be born in December. He was a bit of a surprise, but we are excited to meet him and begin his indoctrination in all the things we love.

And on that note, Emma and I recently finished a collaborative illustration series that will be debuting at the USF Faculty-Alumni Show on Saturday, October 2. It was originally done for Tycho’s baby room and involves the alphabet…and a certain galaxy in a certain faraway location. I’ll be teasing more info on that soon — it’s gonna be a blast.

Happy birthday, Emma. I couldn’t ask for better. I love you.
Bp

Aw yeah…it’s that time again.

Upon reaching the ancient fortress city of Adrost, Arion receives his long-awaited walking papers. But with them comes a peculiar invitation to a banquet from the even more peculiar Baron Lord Ardam – and there are one or two surprise guests in attendance as well.

Yes, the second issue of Black Rose has been completed and it is awesome. Aaron really knocked the art outta the park on this one, and Chris has crammed so much delicious foreshadowing into the dialogue exchanges.

We will be debuting the issue at the Kokomo-Con on Saturday, October 23rd, along with copies of Issue 1 and slick poster prints of both covers. If you’re in the area, stop on by!

And soon after the con, those goodies will also be available in the Black Rose online store, which is currently under construction along with an overall website facelift. I’m knee-deep in HTML and calculating shipping costs at the moment — just one of the many projects demanding my attention nowadays.

More new work later this week!
Bp