Hello! We're Joel and Ashley, "the eyes and ears behind this institution, my friends." (If you get that movie reference we'll give you a prize... or at least a shout out on Twitter or something.) This Paper Ship is our creative vessel, sailing through a stormy sea of ideas! All corny analogies aside, we wanted to open this studio so that we could work as a team doing the thing we love most and creating for people.
Keep checking back here for more updates on our progress!
Check out this wicked blog post about typography we found courtesy of one of our favorite all-time design/illustration blogs, Drawn!
I just drooled all over the keyboard.
Also, please stay tuned, because the link to a new side project is going to be popping up on our website really soon. Hint: it’s brought to you by the letter “F.”
—Joel
We were really bummed last December when we got snowed in and couldn’t participate in Raleigh’s Rock & Shop Market, but all was not lost, because we made the acquaintance of Michelle of IndieNC, a cool Raleigh-based online boutique focusing on emerging artists from all across North Carolina.
We were super excited, then, when she asked us if we wanted to be guest contributors on their blog! We’ve been impressed by how art scenes from cities all over North Carolina talk to each other, and we’ve had such a good time with Greensboro’s growing art scene, that we wanted to focus on the cool people and stuff we’ve seen in Greensboro and the surrounding area so far!
Check out our first post here, and be sure to check back again because we’ll be contributing every day all week!
—Joel & Ashley
This month we had the pleasure of designing a promotional poster for The Green Bean in downtown Greensboro, where Joel has been working part-time on weekends. Elm Street is going to be wicked busy this Monday for the Feb. 1st opening of the International Civil Rights Museum, located in the former Woolworth’s building where the first lunch counter sit-in happened in 1960 and helped kick off that part of the non-violent protests in the Civil Rights Movement.
The Green Bean will be offering this coffee to the massive amount of press Feb. 1, and in the shop as well for at least the entire month of February. As you can see from the poster, they’ll be giving 25% of the sales from the coffee to the Museum. If you’re in the area and can brave the weather, come check out the museum and try out the coffee!
—Joel & Ashley
Since Christmas and our exciting travels to Germany, Scotland, and the coast of NC, we’ve been back in the studio plugging away. November and December 2009 were probably the toughest couple of months for our studio. We suffered the same way every other business did, only it was our first time. Thankfully spending time overseas and with family revived our spirits. By the time we got back home clients seemed to be pouring in and we were ready to take on the new year with a fresh perspective.
We rang in the new year with a whole new set of wedding clients, and fun and whimsical ones at that! One of our first wedding projects was an invitation set for Nathan + Rebecca in Sydney, Australia (our first overseas wedding order). They were already married a couple of months ago so this was a ceremony to celebrate their union with family and friends. The best part was that it was in a bakery and Rebecca gave us complete freedom on designing the invitations off of that theme in a fun, kitschy, and whimsical way. Our favorite wedding invitations are always the ones we get to really throw ourselves into and do the entire thing hand-drawn.
You can find more photos of the full invitation package here. We’ll be posting more progress on some of our other fun invitation packages soon!
In other news, we’re moving closer to the city in Greensboro! After a whole lot of deliberating we decided it would be best to say goodbye to the farm house and step into a more affordable, centrally located place. We are excited about being able to see our local clients on a regular basis and connect more with the local art scene. We even found out there’s a community garden in our neighborhood (just a few houses down) by Urban Harvest. We’re going to continue to keep chickens and grow our own food in the community garden, as well as our yard. We’re also donating a bunch of our furniture to The Barnabas Network. It feels good purging ourselves of stuff we don’t need that other people can really use. Our new place will be much smaller and simple, which is a good thing for us right now. We’ll keep you posted on the progress and maybe even post some pictures of our new place soon!
I just had to say, this show looks hilarious. It’s been slated for production, to debut on Cartoon Network, in 2010. Between this and The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack, I am filled with hope for the future of children’s cartoons. (Now we just need cable in the studio.)
—Joel
We recently had the pleasure of our first interview and photoshoot, and it was a blast! The Greensboro News and Record was more than gracious enough to cover our studio in their Arts & Entertainment insert this month and plaster our faces all over the paper. (We even made the front page masthead!) It was fitting, because ever since we moved to this area last May, we’ve had an overwhelming amount of support, great feedback, and good vibes from the people of Greensboro.
The shots below are way too small to read, so you can check it out online here.
Here’s to surviving into the new year!
The First Friday Indie Market in Greensboro yesterday was, as usual, wonderful! This was the third in a row that we had a booth at, and it’s been getting better every month. We gave out a ton of business cards and sold a good handful of prints. We also had a great time chatting it up with the talented Tristin Miller and Jordan Owens, and though we didn’t get a chance to chat it up with Jody Cedzidlo of Flytrap, she was there too!
Shout-out time: Much love and thanks to Zeke of Rewined Recycled Glassware who has done an incredible job organizing the Market each month since the first one in August. Also, thank you to the art scene of Greensboro, as well as the receptive citizens thereof, for being so supportive of local art. You make us want to fight to stay here and not move out of the area to find work!
We just got our oil tank filled, so we’ve been sitting on our butts all day eating and watching movies in a nice, warm living room with the Christmas tree lit and wafting pine scent. When Monday rolls around, though, we’re going to have to get cracking, because we’ve got plenty of client work, Christmas presents to make, and the Rock and Shop Market to vend at on December 19. Bring it on!
P.S. Stay tuned to the “Places We Go” collection of our Flickr site for photos of the Indie Market!
We had the privilege of designing and illustrating the poster for the First Friday Indie Market again! We’ve been getting into the Christmas spirit a little early design-wise (don’t worry, no tree up yet… not until the big bird hits the table) so we had a blast drawing Santa, snow, and Christmas lights. (Not to mention using retro typography as well…)
If you’re going to be in the Greensboro, NC area on December 4th, make sure to come downtown! They shut down all of Elm Street for the Festival of Lights and we’ll be vending at the market on the corner of South Elm and MLK again. If you’re coming, see you there—if not, let us know if you want custom Christmas card designs!
Lately we’ve been opening the door to more web design, blog design, and other little odds and ends that end up being created for web only. It’s a sigh of relief being able to step away from the maddening printer (and all of the things that can go wrong when translating from screen to paper) and have instant gratification. Of course we do still tear our hair out at web design… especially when it gets into little nit-picky html code corrections (and we usually hit a roadblock for a good couple of hours until we discover it was the most simple mistake EVER). Nonetheless, it’s been good for us to branch out into this new web world. It’s something we’re self taught in since we were trained in a print-based design program, and we’re proud of it, darn it! Web nerds would probably stick their noses up at us and tell us we’re doing it all wrong… but we say HA to them. Being a designer means daring to learn new things to apply your talent and creativity to! And as our friend Susan told us recently, “The answer is always yes” in business. Amen and amen.
So, now that I’ve successfully ranted on my soapbox and bored you to death with all of this web talk, here’s something fun to look at. We recently posted about designing a blog banner for More Peas Please and she came back for a full blog re-design (we adore return clients)! So now we’re in the process of pulling the whimsy of the banner into the full blog page. It’s still a work in progress (we have a lot more coding to play around with and little decorative elements to add in), but here’s what we have so far…
Melissa has been an incredible client to work with so far… she’s so carefree, laid back, and appreciative of our work (even when it’s still in progress).
—Ash
I’m a typography junkie, and I obsessively take pictures of type that I like, especially while traveling. These two delightful hand-illustrated specimens were up in an AMAZING little pastry shop in the town of Fiesole, just up the hill from Florence, where Ashley and I stayed for our honeymoon a year ago this week.
The desserts and coffee there were just as delicious as the drawings.
—Joel
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