PROJECTS BY LAUREN NISHIZAKI

Valentine's Day designs for Pratt Fine Arts Center

2022.02.14
To the left, a square white sticker is clipped to a vertical wood board. The sticker depicts 20+ art-related tools surrounding an orange letter P, a stylized rendering of the Pratt logo. To the right of the sticker sit two white greeting cards. The left one shows the card exterior, orange blobs and red shapes that resemble hearts surrounded by small blue confetti-like marks. The back of the card is viewed at an oblique angle, but an orange P and 5 hand-drawn tools are visible. The card to the right shows the interior, which reads 'Dear Valentine, You put the heart in art. Happy Valentine's Day! With love, from all of us at Pratt'
The final printed card and round sticker that were mailed to Pratt donors.

Pratt Fine Arts Center is an arts education center in Seattle, WA that provides classes and studio space for a wide array of art disciplines, including printmaking, woodworking, glasswork, and jewelry and metal smithing. In January 2022, Megan Zembower from Pratt reached out to me about designing a greeting card and sticker combo that could be sent to Pratt donors in celebration of Valentine’s Day. I delivered print-ready files for the card and sticker, as well as digital files for use on Pratt’s social media channels and website.

I had the pleasure of working with Lauren to create Valentine’s Day cards and stickers which were distributed to supporters of Pratt Fine Arts Center. Not only did Lauren offer several lovely design options to suit our needs, but she also designed a fun artistic rendering of our organization’s logo. Lauren was great to work with and went above and beyond to ensure that we had what we needed from this project, maintaining open communication and delivering her work ahead of schedule throughout the whole process. We are thrilled with how the cards and stickers turned out, too!

—Megan Zembower, Development Manager for the Annual Fund & Donor Events at Pratt Fine Arts Center
A digital illustration of orange blobs and red shapes that resemble hearts, all intermixed with light blue confetti shapes. The orange and red shapes are patchily colored.
A digital illustration of 20+ hand-drawn tools are arranged within a circle. The circle is surrounded by concentric colored lines on a dark grey background.
Images created for social media marketing

Design process

When I was first contacted, Megan mentioned that she and her colleague liked the repetitive nature of my ginkgo leaves card and my “Knit Study No. 1” print. I tried to include similar elements in my design proposals.

20+ hand-drawn art-related tools surrounding a two-tone abstract P. The tools include a ballpeen hammer, paintbrush, hacksaw, letterpress heart, chisel, and brayer, among many others.
Overlapping orange and red blobs on a white background.
Initial ideas for the card – we decided to proceed with both ideas.

I started by coming up with multiple ideas for the card. I settled on two initial ideas: a flat-lay-inspired array of hand-drawn tools, and an abstract design comprised of hand-printed elements (the hand-printed nature was communicated verbally; my initial sketch consisted of overlapping solid shapes). We decided to proceed with both ideas, using the abstract design for the card and the tools for the sticker. Elements on the back of the card tied the two designs together.

Flatlay of a sketchbook with pen illustrations of tools, white sheets of paper printed with red and orange blobs, and tracing paper with more tools.
I inked up and printed from paper cutouts to produce an assortment of hand-printed blob-like shapes; the card design used a selection of these impressions. To create the sticker design, I digitally arranged and rearranged a collection of hand-drawn tools. After finalizing the circular design, I redrew and rescanned the tools to remove scaling distortion.

All designs started out as hand-drawn or hand-printed elements. After all the ink dried, I scanned my source images, color-balanced and touched them up in Lightroom and Photoshop, then composed them into the final designs and typeset Pratt’s message using Affinity Designer. I added additional color accents digitally.

I sent the print-ready files to Pratt with plenty of time for them to be printed and put into the mail, ready to arrive by February 14.