Design Work Life: Cataloging Inspiration Daily

For the month of August, a series of guests will be fill­ing in on DWL with daily posts. Today’s posts come to you from Megan Gonzalez of  Maemae Paperie. For more from Megan, be sure to check out her shop and blog and fol­low her on Twitter. Enjoy!

Recently I noticed that I have a large body of work that is all black and white. That may seem like no big­gie to you but for a sta­tioner who tries to con­vince all her clients that six is an accept­able amount of col­ors to have in their wed­ding invi­ta­tions I was shocked at the amount of sans color sam­ples sit­ting in my archives. Upon fur­ther inves­ti­ga­tion (so funny to exam your own work like that…) I was able to pin­point five dif­fer­ent approaches I take to the world of black and white:

1. use of gold or sil­ver foil
2. blind emboss­ing (let­ter­press­ing with­out color — or a color barely darker than the paper)
3. lots of script and cal­lig­ra­phy (script is usu­ally a bad word here in the stu­dio… excep­tion is min­i­mal black and white…)
4. lots of line work! every­thing is very geo­met­ric.
5. rub­ber stamps! of course they can be used in any color, but black is the sweetest.

A huge thanks to all of my clients who worked with me on all of these black and white projects! xx, Mae