Happy Easter All! 2012-04-08

Wishing you all a lovely Easter.
Ldesigns Studio Team! (more...)

Happy New Year! 2012-01-04

Hope everyone had a great holiday! Wow - it went by so quickly ... actually, 2011 went by quickly. Thanks for helping us make it a great year!

The end of the year was especially hectic - sorry for the lack of posts on our bloggy ...  but we have lots of posts lined up for you this year - so stay connected with us to hear about all of our news and happenings!

Above is the holiday card we produced for our other company ... we got some great comments from our recipients on them - thanks! These were also offered to some of our past clients and designed with special messages to their families and friends. We're actually working on a holiday collection that will launch in the fall - so keep in touch to see the line.

I know that a lot of you have asked for a 'studio tour' and a few posts back I promised we'd give you a sneak peek into the space where all the magic happens. It's coming soon - the photos have been taken, and now we just need to review/crop/colour correct the images and they'll be ready for their unveiling. So hang tight- they are coming.

We also have the inspired Darcy cards we did for a great couple - those are ready and will be up on a post really soon.

You may have noticed a bit of a 'facelift' to the side of our blog ... we've added some spots to the right that will help you stay connected with us ... sign up with your email at the top right and 'like' our fan page - lower right - and keep up with all of our happenings and latest works as well as be entered automatically for any giveaways we have (hint - there's one coming up for Valentine's day).

Hope everyone is doing well and here's to a super 2012!

Lenore

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Studio Tour Sneak Peek! 2012-01-13

Happy Friday everyone!
Hope it's been a good one for you!

Just thought I'd leave you with a sneak peek of our studio snaps we've been promising you. Lots more to come next week - as well as our giveaway announcement!

So don't forget to subscribe via email and like our fan page - all to the right --->

Have a super weekend everyone!

Lenore

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Thank you Mr. Jobs. 2011-10-19

Today is the memorial for Steve Jobs, who upon reflection has helped me with my career accomplishments.

Thank you Steve.
Steve Jobs. I’m sure the name is familiar. The world lost a truly genius man - extremely creative and ahead of everyone else. In the last few days a lot has been written about this man. I have taken the opportunity to read many of the articles to get to know the man behind that famous icon - the apple.
As I suspected, the reason I didn’t know much about him was because he was truly a private person - but during his 2005 Stanford commencement address, we were offered a sneak peek into the life of the man that spearheaded everything behind that icon.
Below is his address
"I am honoured to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College [Portland, Oregon] after the first six months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned Coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky – I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz [Steve Wozniak] and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2bn company with over 4,000 employees. We had just released our finest creation – the Macintosh – a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling-out. When we did, our board of directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologise for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me – I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over. I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world's first computer-animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful-tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, some day you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "no" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7.30 in the morning and it clearly showed a tumour on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for "prepare to die". It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumour. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful, but purely intellectual, concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but some day not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And, most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called the Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of the Whole Earth Catalog, and then, when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words "Stay hungry. Stay foolish". It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay hungry. Stay foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you. Stay hungry. Stay foolish.
Thank you all very much.”

What a beautiful speech ... I think that we can all learn from him and his address ... my favourite part is the following ...
“...Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And, most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary...”
As someone who runs two businesses, this snapshot from his address is very meaningful and inspiring. 
This man is truly behind a lot of what I have accomplished professionally. Twenty years ago I began using a Macintosh - the LCII. It was so exciting to be doing layout electronically at the time. After that I moved on to the Mac 8500, then the eMac, then the MacBookPro, then the iMac (which is what I still use today). I have always been able to rely on my Macs - unlike PC’s that would come and go in my life, the Mac never let me down. I haven’t touched a PC in over ten years and know that I will always be able to count on my trusty Apple products.
The Mac revolutionized the way that graphic designers could work, making layouts easier to create and type setting a work of art. Today I continue to create all of my corporate and personal graphic work as well as my space planning plans on the mac. I run two business with it - create quotes, samples, invoices ... anything needed to operate a business. It continues to make tasks easier and work a pleasure.
Along with my professional life, my personal life relies heavily on everything Steve Jobs has created. My trusty iPad accompanies me everywhere and keeps track of all of my personal contacts, photos and any other information I want handy. My iPhone never leaves my side - and in my opinion - no other ‘smartphone’ even comes close to what this little machine can do along with how beautifully it can do it.
Thank you Steve Jobs ... you won’t be forgotten. (more...)

Featured! Wedding•Invite•Love Lookbook 2011-10-13

We're so lucky to be part of an online wedding invitation directory alongside many wonderful invitation designers - WeddingInviteLove. And now we are so excited to be featured in The WeddingInviteLove lookbook! Tracy from WeddingInviteLove has done a super job of putting this first issue together (Fall 2011). It looks beautiful Tracy - thanks for all of your hard work on the website and with the premiere issue!
Have a peek at the premiere issue below and you can find us on page 56!
Open publication - Free publishing - More calligraphy

Have a super day everyone!
Lenore (more...)