A Landmark Day

This is the 300th post on my blog! Yay! Thanks to my fabulous readers for reading + commenting and helping to make my blogging experience so much fun. In honor of this special day, I'm doing...

a giveaway.

Yep, another one! Want the details?

I hope you all enjoy this giveaway. Comment on this post, and if you have any questions, email me: carrie[at]carrieannedesign[dot]com

Blogroll Spotlights

You all have probably noticed that, since I redesigned my blog, I added a blogroll page at the top menubar. I think it's a fun way to show the blogs I'm enjoying these days. :) But I realized that the blogroll page doesn't really say anything much about what each of the blogs are about. So I thought I'd pick a few and tell you a little more about why I like them.

First up: Two, a diptych project by Beth Altrogge and Carissa Gallo, both great photographers whose work I really admire. Their project was partially what inspired me to try The Bird and the Plum with Jalynn.

If you check out this blog, you'll see some really creative photos & ideas.

Another blog on my blogroll list is Smrvl, a blog by graphic designer and artist David Somerville. It's fun to see what projects he's working on and neat to see other art and design he posts about. One of the descriptions on the site is "like a notebook," and I really enjoy that aspect of it. Most of the posts are pretty short and to the point - and looking through is like seeing a collection of artistic items.

If you check out this blog, you'll see a selection of art and design snippets.

One more before I go... Tullian Tchividjian's blog. It's another great blog from the Gospel Coalition (ah, how I would've loved to go to their conference!) and what I like most about this blog is how it's so gospel, gospel, gospel. Over and over again, in different ways and from different angles, the main thing on this blog is the "main thing" of Christianity: the gospel of Jesus Christ.

If you check out this blog, you'll see encouraging thoughts on the gospel.

I hope you all enjoy this little peek into a couple of my blogroll favorites. If you're looking for more, check out the other blogs I like. And I'd love to hear from you, too - what blogs do you like?

Playing

With Arimo.

What do you think?

Freebie Finds

There's lots of great design to be found around the internet in the form of logos, products, and other things you can buy. But there are some great freebies out there, too: examples of good design that people are kindly offering for free download. So I thought I'd do a post chronicling some of those things so that you can enjoy them and get a peek into why I like them.

First up, this cube calendar pattern from Pen Pencil Stencil.

I saw it through How About Orange, and I really like the concept and the design. A cube calendar is a fun idea - unique from the standard wall calendar or even the flip kind you put on your desk. This calendar could be an entertaining toy as well as a useful scheduling device. And the design is great as well. I love the bright colors, the patterns, and the way the patterns are overlayed on top of a wood pattern: a neat and trendy technique.

Another neat freebie is this desktop background from State of the Obvious by Mash Creative.

I've blogged about S/O/T/O before and I think their design technique is really neat. Stating the obvious is so obvious, but because it's not done in design super frequently, it's creative and fun. Their products are neat, but if you're looking for something exceedingly affordable, try the cool desktop background. It comes in several different sizes.

For digital scrapbookers or those who are interested in getting into digital scrapbooking, I'd recommend this free kit from Kitschy Digitals. Isn't it cute?

I love their products and have used them on most of my recent scrapbook pages. I think this kit is a really good sampling of different types of fun, retro elements. You can get it here.

One more thing: a neat free font. I've been enjoying using the font Amperzand lately, available free from Dafont. Here's something I made myself with the font.

The elegant but not stuffy cursive script is a style that I like, and I find that it has a fancy look while still looking a bit modern and fun. I like this font!

I also ran across a site called Simple Desktops through How About Orange. It's a collection of tons of neat minimalistic desktop backgrounds.

There are some really neat designs there, like this and this, for instance. Keep in mind, though, that I didn't look through the whole archives, so if you do, look carefully because I have no idea what's on some of the past desktops. I thought it was a neat site, though, and a good idea to collect lots of simplistic desktop backgrounds in one place.

I hope you've enjoyed this little look at some fun freebies, and I hope you download and enjoy a few. :) Do you have a favorite of the ones I've posted?

Digital Scrapbook Pages

I thought you all might like to see some digital scrapbook pages I've made recently! I like digital scrapbooking as a quick and easy way to play around with designing something - it combines my love of scrapbooking with my love of digital things like design and Adobe software. :) Here are a few of my recent creations.

This first one is just a fun (probably too busy) page about my love of Starbucks double chocolatey chip frappuccinos. It was fun to make, though.

This page took awhile to figure out how to design because I had so much text I wanted to include. I ended up putting the main elements and some journaling in the middle with more words around. I hand-drew the "I don't know" and "I know" in Adobe Illustrator. (My friend Mariah took that picture of me, by the way.)

I made this with some pictures of Ruche and Anthropologie items that I had collected from their websites. It was fun to make a little collage of some of the items I really like.

Most of the supplies for these projects are from Kitschy Digitals - my favorite source for digital scrapbooking goods. What do you all think of these pages? I'd love to hear!

Friday Finds: Flower Tutorials

Today I wanted to direct your attention to this post on Skip to My Lou - it has tons of great ideas for making flowers, like this one:

Some Nice Advertisements

Sometimes I like to think about the graphic design side of advertising. I think it's interesting to analyze it, and talk about what's good and not so good about it - or even try to figure out how the design helps sell the product. So I thought I'd share two pretty ads today and tell you my thoughts on them. Please chime in and tell me what you think, too!
First up, an Anthropologie ad. I found this on their website, and even though it's web-based, it's similar to the style of their catalogs, too.

I love, love, love this. Pretty much everything about it is a "win" in my mind. But here are some specifics:

The next ad I want to show you is from Basic Grey. I saw it in CK, and I liked it, so I thought I'd tell you about it. This ad is for one of Basic Grey's lines of scrapbooking paper and embellishments.

Isn't this so pleasant? The patterns are so fun. I like this ad, and here are some reasons why.

 So I hope you enjoyed this quick peek into the design side of two fun advertisements. What do you all think of the ads? Or are there any other ads you've seen lately that you think are neat?