My Clients de Faux

I've got a lot of pretty dull examples of work in my portfolio. Up until recently, I thought it was a good idea to include only final, published material as a way to tell an potential employer that I'd worked and gotten paid for things.

Some of you are already throwing up your hands and getting ready to school me on this folly. I'd like to call your attention to that part up there when I wrote "up until recently".

So, I got it, thanks.

When I'm not designing for anyone, or when I'm working for a group who hates design so much that they'd rather die than let me create something that I'd be proud of, I fall back on my clients de faux. This selection of fake businesses gives me an opportunity to work on designs that might not go over well with existing businesses. Sometimes, it's understandably too experimental or maybe too 'untested' of an idea for, say, an event planner to put their trust in. Other times, it's a really killer design that a client turned away because of their aforementioned hatred of aesthetically pleasing, professional work. A lot of times, it's simply a plan I have but don't know how to execute with enough confidence that I'd ever turn it in as a paid concept.

My Fake Clients aren't without their flaws and challenges. For one, there's not enough (or any) constraints put on the work and I know myself well enough to understand that while I often react angrily to rules, I just as often follow them. Also, while I'd love to believe that anything I make is going to be straight-up diamonds in the first shot, I know that only though detailed, well-thought out critique will I be able to reshape the final draft into something exceptional; therefore, I need people other than just me looking at the project.

That said, I love my Fake Clients and I want to do right by them.

The first one I came up with was back when I was so new to the design game that all I really knew how to do was sketch. No Illustrator, no InDesign, hell, no computer. Just some Prismacolor pencils and variations on my Catholic school-taught Palmer Method handwriting.

Salome Vinyards (sic) didn't exist but I thought it should. I'd recently gotten back from a visit to Tonnerre, France where I'd seen a vineyard, house, and shop for sale, starting a chain reaction of plan-making that involved cutting all ties and becoming a grape farmer. Eventually, I accepted that I might just really like designing for wine rather than designing the wine itself.

Years later, I discovered desktop publication and returned to wine labels, this time with a Lovecraft theme.

This one was a bonus because a narrowed version of the squid ended up working out nicely for my Myopic! Studio logo, which is another fake business. In fact, it's the fake studio that designs for the fake businesses.

This month, I tried to move away from sticking solely to illustration and wanted to do something a little more commercial, a little more ubiquitous. I know that sounds silly: why wouldn't I want my work to stand out, especially in my own portfolio? The short answer is that I wanted to show that I can work within a consumer market, albeit mostly targeted at the high end. It's worth it for me to take a walk down 5th Avenue every month to see what the designers are doing if I can bring those inspirations back and put them to work, even if I have to  use them in clients de faux, in this case, a boutique label called Cherie Paris (I think of it as rhyming: sharee-paree).

The model is a stock image, except for the pattern on her glove because I'd envisioned Cherie Paris being a brand of gloves at first, and the rest was drawn in Illustrator. Everything was assembled in Photoshop. I'll run in and tighten it up after I go a few days without thinking about it but this is likely going to be close to how it'll appear in my 2013 portfolio.

As a sort of epilogue note, about six months ago, I'd started a similar idea on my iPad, in a vector drawing app called Inkpad, but lost the file (i.e. the whole iPad) before I could polish the design but I'm happy enough with it to share it here.

Aside from the name change, it appears that they also closed the London store.