I submitted this book cover design concept for the Burnet Media Young Visual Designer Cover Competition 2011 and it made the short-list.

Christoff van Wyk’s design went on to claim top spot.

Click here to view his winning cover and the other short-listed designs.

I won last year’s round with my cover concept for Zuma’s Bastard by Azad Essa.

Preparing for Eid and maximising one’s ibaadah in these final moments of Ramadaan can be quite the juggle.

If Eid gifting is on your lengthy last-minute-to-do list, here’s one less thing to occupy your head-space.

I’ve put together these Eid Mubarak cards for you to download and print.

Assemble the cards by printing each one on an A4 sheet of paper.

Follow the grey line and trim off the white border.

Orientate your paper so that it’s print side up and in landscape position.

Fold the paper in half horizontally. If you’re familiar with origami, this would be a mountain-fold.

Fold the paper in half again; this time the crease will be vertical and you’ll have the printed image on the front of the card which will now open from left-to-right.

The card will be blank on the inside, leaving you plenty of space to pen in your message and aadiyah for a loved one.

Click here to download the printable Eid cards pdf file (includes all three versions of the card).

Incorporating a digital paper design from Nicole Seitler’s Sugarplum Paperie, I designed an invitation and a few printables for the party’s decor.

The family wanted to keep the sex of the baby a surprise and the minty candy colours worked well as a neutral scheme .

Here are a few pictures Aasia took at the baby shower:

The revised logo:

Label designs for packaging:

Business cards:

The cards arrived standard issue from the printers.
To customise them, I used corner-rounder and craft punches on each card, positioning the teardrop punch shapes so that when I use the card on a package, they would allow for a ribbon to be threaded through.

Analogous to the readying of a manuscript for publication, the design for her business cards underwent a few revisions and adjustments to the plot.

To add a bit of personality and relevance to the card, I asked Shubnum to provide a sketch she’d done of herself writing.

Shubnum’s book is available to purchase online at Exclusive Books.

Glitterdust is an online retailer who specialises in scarves and accessories for the “fashionable and modest-conscious Hijabi”.

Some of the conceptual designs:

Double-sided

Single-sided

The final designs:

For MJ and Kareema’s wedding gift, I laid out a selection of tried-and-tested recipes from Nafisa and myself.

The layout was exported as a PDF and burnt on to a CD with a modified version of the recipe book’s cover used as the artwork for the CD’s jewel case inserts.

Click on thumbnails for page samples.

My theme for the afternoon, “So Long Jo’burg, Hello Cape Town”, was framed by silhouettes of the Johannesburg skyline and Table Mountain and pulled together with shades of pink and brown in the design of the bunting, paper tents, labels and cupcake toppers.

Paper bunting strung together with bakers’ twine

Labels and cup-cake toppers

Favour bags filled with sweets

To create this topper, I altered a gift tag by stitching bakers’ twine around the edge.

Suppliers:

Bakers’ twine, gift tag used as cake topper, individual paper cupcake stands, pink paper doilies, favour bags and candy-stripe straws from www.ingoodcompany.co.za

Mummy’s farewell also received a mention on the In Good Company blog.

The toolkit consisted of three sections linked to a manual and an additional resource for church-based capacity workshops. This had to be designed in a way that made it easy to link the different activities and handouts to the relevant modules. We decided on using colour cues for quick referencing between the modules.

The toolkit’s overall structure (Click image for larger view)

An example of a colour-coded hand-out (Click image for larger view)

The first thing I designed for this really simple suite was the party-pack gift-tags.

My sister-in-law Fatima had already put together garden-themed party favours for her daughter Aaminah’s friends, each consisting of a plastic planter, “ladybug” chocolates and other complementing elements.

I took my cue from the colours of the planters she’d purchased and used Inkscape to create the pot plant graphic and the shape and fill of the tags.

After seeing the tags, she decided she’d like to have a few invitations printed as well.

The birthday brunch had been booked at a nearby restaurant for just a few of Aaminah’s closest friends. It was a very informal get-together and didn’t really require proper printed invites, but it was a sweet touch and I think my niece appreciated the form they took.

I decided to carry the look and feel of the gift-tag through to the invitation. I edited the Fiolex Girls font so that I’d have little blossoms instead of hearts for the title wording. We kept the assembly simple and all that was required was to have a folded invitation fastened shut with a vertical bellyband.