Merry Christmas and this year's highlights

Merry Christmas and thanks to everyone who has been following my journey so far. I've had an amazing year and couldn't have done it without all the support of my family (especially my husband), friends and, of course, my lovely customers - I am truly grateful! Here are some of my gooseberrymoon highlights of the year:

~ Being featured on various blogs including Folksy's Frankly magazine.
~ Getting my notecards and greetings cards stocked in two of  North Wales Tourist Information Centres.
~ Signing up for The Art and Business of Surface Pattern Design course and creating my first patterns.
~ Becoming a Paper Girl and learning 'how to be fabulous in business' thanks to Lucy Ledger and Abigail Warner.
~ Adding a transactional shop to my own website.
~ Creating a dedicated studio space in my home.
~ My website winning Moonfruit's site of the week.
~ Reaching over 400 likes on my Facebook page.
~ Designing for my 50th Bride and Groom.
and finally... possibly the most life changing decision to quit my day job and run gooseberrymoon full time.

See you in 2013!

Just my type {Baskerville}

Baskerville is such a beautiful serif font, and the more I look at it the more I like it. It's one of those fonts that's used all around without us really noticing it. With its sharp and tapered serifs, and curved strokes in contrasting thick and thin lines, what's not to love about it!

Designed by John Baskerville in 1757 this font is classified as a transitional font, placed between old style and modern. It's a classic font and is often used in books and papers with lots of text but I much prefer it when it is used sparingly and large showing off its curves and strokes to their full loveliness.

Image credits - Habitat | Waterstones | Dragonfly

Waterstones and Habitat have both used it for their logos and I'm loving it used on the bottles of Dragonfly Winery.

Just my type {Cooper Black}

Image source

Not sure that many designers would come out of the closet and admit to being a fan of Cooper Black, and don't get me wrong it's not in my top ten favourite fonts and quite possibly not in my top 20 but anyway, I definitely have a soft spot for it. With its rounded serifs and its simple, curvy style, to me it looks like it was designed in the 60s, when in fact it was designed in the early 1920s by Oswald Bruce Cooper. The font was made popular by its appearance on the cover of the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds album in 1966 and then it was used everywhere! You only need to google 'cooper black' to see it was on album covers, shop facias, magazines (some particularly dodgy ones), newspaper headlines, posters etc. 

Image sources: Iceland van, Easy Jet Planes, Garfield book, The Black Keys Album, The Beach Boys Album, Doors Album

Cooper Black has quite a colourful history and a book has been published showing many of the ways it has been used by designers over the years. To find out even more about this font take a look at this short film.

Image source 

I've spotted Cooper Black put to good use a couple of times this week, firstly in the White Stuff Spring catalogue and on the packaging of Spicentice.

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Both these examples prove that when used in the right way and coupled with the right fonts, this bold, dated and friendly font can be beautiful. And whats good enough for White Stuff and all that!