Carolyn E. Cooper Communications

Graphic Design Examples

A Mingled Yarn Ad

Interweave Knits, February 2006

Even though this was labeled the spring issue, it hit the stands in February and was gone with the first tulip in most of North America. It's the peak time for most of Interweave Knits audience to cuddle up with their warmest projects and Elsie the cat was the shop mascot. The ad generated over a 100 inquiries from around the world and a 220% increase in site traffic.

A Mingled Yarn Ad

Interweave Knits, April 2006

For the summre issue I decided to catch the feel of the season and contrast the bulk of the other ads which tended to be dark (lots of black backgrounds). The ad not only stood out but generated several calls from people looking for the more obscure yarns listed.

A Mingled Yarn Logo

The basic logo design for the shop

The idea was to capture the feel of a turn-of-the-19th-century English shop combined with the idea of mingled yarns. The graphic was created entirely from assorted commercial fonts. It was produced from my own product photographs in Adobe Photoshop.

PDF Image

A Mingled Yarn Duotoned Ad

A duotoned newspaper ad

The Sequim Gazette offered A Mingled Yarn a one-time second spot color for a special gift guide mailer. The space was limited as were the color choices, but the ad garnered a number of calls. Many commented on that the ad stood out against the myriad of red & black text blocks on the page.

A Mingled Yarn Gift Guide Ad

A cartoon based newspaper ad

A local cartoonist did a number of Edwardian and fiber-related custom cartoons for A Mingled Yarn and several were used as the base for ads and promotions. The font choices and positioning were designed to quickly capture the shop style and the feel of the cartoon. The whimsical black & white pieces stood out from the other staid, traditional ads despite their smaller size.

Complete PDF Newsletter

A Mingled Yarn Newsletter

This is the Spring 2006 issue of the shop newsletter

Approximately 4 times a year a newsletter of classes, upcoming events, store highlights, humor and more was produced for mailing to at least 1,600 customers. The style and layout varied slightly depending upon how much needed to be squeezed into the minimum amount of space, but it was always based on a 4 column grid design.

FuFest Title Image

The title graphic for a multimedia CD

Put 3 Geek Grrls at a convention with 60+ people snapping pictures and video, give them unlimited coffee and 3 days and you end up with a commemortive CD. This was the title image for the section that became a multimedia merging of material of the event shot by the participants. The dragon as masked in Photoshop from a location tour shot in Toronto's Chinatown taken on Saturday morning. The CD's were miraculous handed out to everyone at Sunday night's farewell reception.

KFTLC Title Image

The title graphic from multimedia slideshow

This was the title image from the multimedia slideshow of the celebrity attendees at the Toronto convention. A lot of Photoshop color and filtering work was done to get the "lucky red hot" feel. The fonts were chosen because they matched the series fonts. The photo was taken by me. Fortunately, I had a large number of the photos already scanned into my system by the time we caem with the idea of the second multimedia focusing on the celebrities alone. In addition to the two multimedia selections, the CD included all of the photos and clips provided by the attendees and authorized by the attendees. Thank goodness there was an espresso bar in the hotel!

Article Illustration

A composite Photoshoped web graphic

This is just one of several illustrations done for various feature articles for an web zine. The trick was not only illustrating the theme of each article, but keeping reducing the final image to as small a download size as possible due to the low bandwidth common at the time. A lot of tweaking was done with filters and color adjustments to optimize the download while keeping a fairly sharp edge to the images and colors. And in those days, Photoshop layers were quite primitive.