Crystal Madrilejos

Being one of the two graphic designers in the family (my brother, Tom, is also a designer. Check out his work here. It’s really great.), my computer skills are called upon pretty regularly to design invites for all types of occasions. My Mom’s 66th birthday is this month and I’ve been asked to do the invitation for her party. Over the years, I’ve found that designing invitations for my family can be a fun way to play around and do all the crazy things I normally can’t do when it comes to client work. It’s also a good way to learn new things in InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop, but still have a purpose and a finished product in the end.

This year was my Dad’s 70th birthday and we threw a big surprise party. My sister had a cake made at one of those places that has one of those fancy frosting printers and I got to design the graphic for the top of the cake. Most of the time those printouts don’t turn out well because it’s usually just a bad quality photo or just completely botched. But there is actually so much potential for it to turn out really cool!

This is what we had printed on my Dad’s cake:

And it turned out pretty neat! (Unfortunately, we I don’t have a photo of the actual cake. If I can find one, I’ll post it.)

Just one note, if you are planning on having something printed on a cake. Try not to use a graphic that has big areas of black, or all your guests will be walking around with discolored teeth! I tried to keep the black to a minimum on this one, but or course it’s difficult to not have any black if you are going to have any type of photo.

-c.