Design House of Moira | Design House Prep School | A School for Creatives | Creative Workshops

course descriptions

Intro to Instagram Styling

If you're anything like us, you love scrolling through Instagram and looking at all the pretty pictures -- and so do your potential clients!

Compelling visuals paint a picture for potential clients and customers. Maybe these are beautifully shot examples of your work, or maybe they're lifestyle images that evoke your brand's mood. You want your visitors to easily picture the ways in which your creative business and artistic endeavors can add value to their lives.

This course will cover both the basics of Instagram as a social media branding platform, including concepts such as showing your style, making choices with intention, and using hashtags, as well as tips on the actual creation of well-photographed content. For styling and photography, we'll go over the basics of how to light your photos, choose props, and style and edit your images.

Used effectively, Instagram can be a powerful tool to bring awareness of your brand, network with other creatives, and drive traffic to your inbox!

Contracts and Invoices for Creatives

Having amazing artistic talent is only half the battle. Robust contracts are there to protect you and your clients to make sure everyone is getting what they need out of the relationship.

Perhaps you had a background in law before you got started in a creative business, in which case, AWESOME, let's be friends! But if you're like the rest of us, you may not have any experience creating your own contracts and invoices and may be floundering to know what you may need to do to get all your i's dotted and t's crossed.

For this course, we worked with the lovely and talented Paige Hulse of Paige Hulse Law, who is an attorney for creative entrepreneurs and online small business owners. After working as a contract litigator by day and running a calligraphy business by night, in 2017 she took the leap of starting her own practice, bridging the gap between the creative and legal worlds. She now works one on one with creatives at Paige Hulse Law, and recently opened the Creative Law Shop, where she sells contract templates and resources for entrepreneurs.

You'll walk away from this course with the knowledge you need to set your creative business up the right way when it comes to your contracts and invoices.

Designing a Suite - FROM Start to Finish

If you've been following along with DHPS over the past two years, we've been slowly building the foundations for completing a successful project with a wedding stationery client. We've learned to develop our creative process, work with our clients through the sketching process to nail down their ideas, guide clients to the right decisions about paper and printing based on their desires and budget, and digitize our hand-done artwork into something we can use in a digital design.

All of those skills are SUPER important and will make your life 100% easier over the course of your project, but how do you go about designing the suite itself?

This course will cover the nitty gritty details of how to make your design decisions as you implement all the information you've gathered from your client into their dream invitation suite. How will you lay out your artwork? Where will you put the visual weight? What kind of printing are you doing, and how will that affect your artwork? We'll work through the design of an example suite in the course from digitized artwork to the final print-ready files.

Watercolor III - florals

In our first two watercolor courses, you learned how to experiment with and discover the properties of your paints, basic techniques such as wet-on-wet and wet-on-dry painting, how to combine colors into a color wheel to further explore your chosen paints, and how to use those color combinations to mix your own custom paints and inks.

Watercolor III will build on those foundations and bring you into the realm of creating floral and leaf shapes! The first part of the course will be devoted to studies of the anatomy of a flower and learning different centers and petal shapes as well as basic composition. Firm grounding in the formation and foundations of actual florals is integral to creating your own interpretation that is still recognizable as a flower to your audience. We will be learning how to take actual flower anatomical parts and combine them together creating a stylized version. The ultimate goal of this course, explored in the latter half of the course, is to help you create non-photorealistic floral and leaf artwork of your own.

Design House Prep School | A School for Creatives | Creative Workshop

Digitizing II - creating a digital proof

In Digitizing I, you learned to scan and clean physical artwork in Photoshop and Illustrator, turning your work into digital files you could use in, for example, a wedding invitation suite of your own design. This course builds on those skills and complements "Designing a Suite - From Start to Finish" by showing you how to create a digital proof of your completed artwork designs for your client.

We love the way a digital proof helps to elevate your client experience to the next level. A well-done proof clearly communicates the various features of your project from the main invitation to the custom wax seals, helps your client better imagine the full suite and final product as a whole, and allows you to share a visually pleasing, branded representation of the whole project altogether!

We'll be using Adobe InDesign extensively in this course and taking advantage of how the Creative Suite products play nicely together. You'll walk away from this course with a thorough crash course in the basics of InDesign, plus the knowledge and tools to complete a document template for your own digital proofs. No previous InDesign knowledge is required - we'll be going over everything you need to know!

While purchase of this particular program is by no means a requirement for taking the course, commands and functions we use may be specific to InDesign. If you are more comfortable with another desktop publishing program, would prefer to create your proof fully within another program such as Photoshop or Illustrator, or have not yet decided to take the plunge and purchase the Adobe products yourself, you may still find many of the principles we discuss helpful in your case.

Calligraphic Flourishing

If you're at all familiar with our work at Design House of Moira, you know we love pointed pen calligraphy. Even more, you know we love flourishes on our calligraphy. Flourishes in the right place can bring emphasis to certain words, bring balance to a piece, add artistic style, and change the overall feel of whatever you are calligraphing.

Whether your finished calligraphy will be used for the names on an invitation or a calligraphed envelope address, wedding vows or a monogram, mastering the art of flourishing will elevate your calligraphy and help you create a more polished final piece.

In this course, we will cover common styles of flourishing, common mistakes, how to build muscle memory, visually balance your flourish placement, and finish with examples of how you can apply flourishes to multi-line pieces.

Stationer 101 Class Pass

As we developed our new course Designing a Suite: From Start to Finish, we realized there are a lot of other courses already available in DHPS that students interested in creating a wedding invitation suite for a client would benefit from. This class bundle will take you through the must-take courses -- truly from start to finish -- so that you can properly conceptualize and make decisions about everything from your creative process to the actual nitty gritty details of designing your artwork and digitizing and printing them.

WHAT YOU'LL GET

- SEVEN awesome classes

Establishing Your Creative Process
Sketching for Creative Businesses
Design Boards for Creative Businesses
Paper & Printing Flowchart
Designing a Suite: From Start to Finish
Digitizing I: Calligraphy & Artwork
Digitizing II: Creating a Digital Proof

- 15% off the cumulative total for all seven courses in one class pass

- Access to anything included in the courses individually, such as:

course videos,
handouts, and
access to the private Facebook group.

STATIONER 101 CLASS DESCRIPTIONS

ESTABLISHING YOUR CREATIVE PROCESS

Honing and refining your creative process as a business is such an incredibly important part of owning and running a profitable creative business. You could have the most compelling idea for a product or service ever, but without a strong process to back it up, you'll be using up all your time putting out unnecessary fires rather than being productive and creating more awesome stuff to sell.

A consistent workflow and well-established process helps us manage our clients, set client expectations correctly, correct our time management problems, elevate our client's experience, and ultimately be more profitable. It puts YOU in the driver's seat, helping you and the client to be more efficient and effective, and ultimately creating a more satisfying experience for everyone involved.

This course will walk you through general steps based on our creative process as a stationer, all while discussing ideas and questions you should go through as you develop your own creative process to best suit your own unique business and clients.

SKETCHING FOR CREATIVE BUSINESSES

Communication - the key to a successful relationship. This is true for any relationship, but especially one with your client!

As a stationer, I can't overstate how much sketching has helped me communicate more effectively and efficiently with clients. This is a perfect course for those creatives in stationery related businesses looking to hone their paper process with their clients, but it's also a great course for all creatives looking to smooth out their customer experience.

We'll talk about why having a sketching stage is important, how transparent to be with your clients, its advantages as well as how to go about adding a sketching stage into your own process.

If you have or are planning to take the Creative Process course, this course goes hand-in-hand with the principles laid out in that course!

DESIGN BOARDS FOR CREATIVES

After taking the Creative Process course in Semester I, hopefully you now understand the value in refining your creative process and see how it plays into the client experience. In addition to sketching (also talked about in Semester I), design boards are a great detail that can be added to your creative process to help narrow down a client's needs and wants.

Design boards can be used to hone in on and communicate design scopes to clients. Further narrowing your creative process allows for less time doing the back and forth with clients as well as reducing the amount of time spent with too many ideas flying around. Design boards help both you as the creative, as well as your client, keep the end design goals in mind, stay focused, and work more efficiently.

In this course you'll be walked through creation of a very basic design board for a client's branding.

PAPER + PRINTING FLOW CHART

Commercial printing, whether you outsource or print in-house, is never as easy as just hitting Ctrl+P. Learn the ins and outs, save yourself time, money, and sanity as we walk you through choosing the correct design + paper + printing method for yourself and your clients from the start. If you've ever struggled to finish a project on time due to printing snafus, last minute design changes based on printing methods, or struggled to reconcile your client's vision with your printing capabilities, this is the course for you!

In addition to the nitty gritty of actual printing, we'll also be looking at helping your clients make their paper/printing decisions correctly through education, correct presentation and bringing in some "spin" that we'll learn in the Art of Saying No.

DIGITIZING CALLIGRAPHY AND ARTWORK

Do you have awesome artwork or calligraphy skills on paper and no idea how to translate that to the computer? Digitizing your work is the first step in translating your beautiful artwork from paper to pixel. We'll be starting at the beginning and walking you through scanning, editing and using calligraphy and artwork in your layouts and designs. This will be a beginner to intermediate course.

Although instruction will be using specific examples and methods in the Adobe Creative Suite (specifically, Photoshop), we do not require you to purchase Photoshop in order to take the course. The same principles could be applied to other photo-editing software, including free alternatives like GIMP, or take advantage of the free trial from Adobe to see if Photoshop is for you.

DESIGNING A SUITE - FROM START TO FINISH

If you've been following along with DHPS over the past two years, we've been slowly building the foundations for completing a successful project with a wedding stationery client. We've learned to develop our creative process, work with our clients through the sketching process to nail down their ideas, guide clients to the right decisions about paper and printingbased on their desires and budget, and digitize our hand-done artwork into something we can use in a digital design.