Design Spotlight: Natalie Kinnear

Today’s Design Spotlight is on artist Natalie Kinnear – cute card! I love the use of white space, and the balance between the dog photo and the text.

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Hello, my name is Natalie Kinnear.  I am a 52 year old wife and mum.  I’ve been married to a great guy for 26 years and have four wonderful children, although I’m not sure I can still call them children as they are 18, 20, 22 and 24 years old.  I also have four – don’t ask me what it is about the number four  – gorgeously unique and wonderful rescue dogs who frequently feature in my card designs.  I am passionate about animals, especially dogs, and am actively involved in animal rescue.  I live on a little island known as England.  Yup, I’m a Brit.

I started to get a bit sensitive about my age after I’d reached 40.  When I was 45, however, I was diagnosed with breast cancer so now, having successfully been through treatment, I’m only too happy to be reaching the bigger numbers.  The bigger the better!

When people ask me what I do, my standard reply is ‘I mess about with photos’.  I suppose I consider myself a serious photography enthusiast.   My workflow involves uploading my images from the memory card into Adobe Lightroom for initial adjustments.  Then, any images I think I can use I transfer to Adobe Photoshop where I do the editing and design work.  I’m now also learning, or trying to learn, Adobe Illustrator, so that I can branch out a little from doing mainly photographic designs.

I’m afraid I’m definitely one of those arty types in that I work best from moments of inspiration and when I get into the zone, as I call it, I become oblivious to everything around me, totally immersing myself in the creative process and losing all track of time.  It’s wonderful, I love it.

I was delighted to be asked to do a Design Spotlight but didn’t find it easy choosing a favourite card. I guess if I were really pushed to pick just one it would be my ‘humorous upside-down dog with tongue sticking out’ design – although I might need to work a bit on that title!

The sweetheart who stars in this image is Sally, one of our four rescue dogs.  One day, with the three eldest kids away at various universities, we finally got around to making use of a temporarily empty bedroom and turning it into a studio.  Well when I say studio, we made a space big enough to put up a white background and allow the use of two large lights.  This photo of Sally was taken during my all time first studio photo shoot, very exciting.  All the dogs, my assistants (my husband and youngest daughter) and I, had a great fun time.  The dogs were particularly keen on all the extra playing with toys and the surplus of treats, hugs and fuss they got.  All in all it was a blast!

One of the things I’ve read about design is that it is not only about the placement of the various elements, but also about the type and amount of space that is created around those elements.   For this card I deliberately positioned the image in the top right hand corner and going out of frame so that there was a lot of space between the image and the text.  This, I felt, would bring about a rather quirky and light hearted effect, emphasising the notion that Sally was being cheeky and playful and, hopefully, increasing the level of visual humour.  I also deliberately kept the design very simple – dog, white background, text – so that there were no distracting elements which would draw the viewer’s attention away from the gentle humour being shared.

I usually spend forever trying to find the right font for text.  For this card I was looking for something that had a hand written and fun feel to it which would be in keeping with the overall purpose of the design.  The font I finally chose is called Valerian Handwriting.

And finally, as most of the sales of this card are likely to be to Americans, I e-mailed the design over to Jeanne, one of my lovely American friends, to check that the humour would work that side of the pond.  From this piece of investigative journalism (ha ha), I learned not only that, “yes, Americans definitely do raspberries”, but also that the card had really made Jeanne’s son giggle.  Wow, what a great feeling that was, to find out that one of my designs had made someone laugh.  That definitely made it all worth while!  Although, of course, lots of sales would be quite nice too!