Lumi Holiday Case Study

We help you make branded supplies in a jiffy.
November 2015

Originally published on www.cortes.us

In November 2015, I was approached by the team over at Lumi.com to collaborate with them by creating a series of illustrations and type to help promote their service over for Christmas Holiday. The turn around was only a week but it seemed like a super fun project and they did not give me too much restraint on what to create so I thought I’d go for it. Turned out to be super fun!

Brief

I was asked to create a design for each of the following: gift bags, a rubber stamp, a pre-inked stamp, a paper embosser, and a gold decal. The criteria for each were as follows:

1. Rubber stamp for gift tags:
“Special Delivery” + “To: ______ From: ______”

2. Pre-inked stamp for patterned gift paper:
A holiday illustration ideal for repetition

3. Embosser for gift cards / tags:
“Gift Happy” or illustration

4. Gold Decal
“Shine On” and/or illustration

5. Gift Bag
Open to my own interpretation

Moodboard

As with all of my projects, I started out with gathering inspiration to help get me on the right track from the beginning.

I wanted to go with a minimal stroke style for all of these illustrations so I looked around and found some pieces that I felt best fit the aesthetic I wanted. Below you can see a few of the pieces I used for reference.

Sketches

While drawing out my ideas, I had to keep in mind the sizes that these works would be. For example, the rubber stamp would only be around 2 inches in height and width while the gold decal would be over a foot long.

This is super important in terms of composition and spacing to make sure everything looked great when it came time to the physical product. For something smaller, if I had elements that were too close to each other, the inking process would cause bleed and illegibility which is of course not what I want.

Unfortunately the notebook that I had my intitial ideas in was misplaced so I am not able to show you them. 😭

Vectoring

I then went on to putting my favorite ideas from my sketches into vector form. After a few hours of work over a few days, I had a pretty good idea of how the final pieces would look, here’s a screenshot from my artboard at the end of the project after I cleaned out the older ideas I didn’t like:

Finals

After I chose which ones to send off to Lumi and was happy with spacing and composition of each one, I sent them on their way while I eagerly waited to see them be made into physical products. You can see 4/5 final files below.

Photography

Lumi was kind enought to provide me with some awesome photos to show off the hard work I put into these designs and has given me permission to show them to you guys here. Check them out below!

You can also see Lumi’s blog post about the project and find out how to purchase these physical goods here.

I’m always open to take on new freelance work and talk about hiring opportunities, feel free to email me at hi@cortes.us if you’d like to get in touch!

That’s it for this case study you can see more on www.cortes.us or if you’d like to stay updated with me and more of my work, be sure to follow me on Twitter! Hope you enjoyed!

— Dennis Cortes