Creating Laura Jane Illustrations X CASTiFY
When I say that getting to work with CASETiFY on a collab collection was a literal dream come true, trust me, I am not being dramatic. When the first email hit my inbox in early 2022 about potentially creating a collection together I genuinely thought it was spam, because I couldn't believe that CASETiFY were reaching out to ME! Luckily it wasn't spam and now, after months of hard work, I get to see my work on CASETiFY's website and on all your phones and devices when you send me photos of your orders. So much time, love and thought went into the creation of this collection so I thought I would share a little bit more about how it came about & my inspirations behind it.
how the collaboration came about...
I've been a fangirl of CASETiFY cases and their artist collaboration program pretty much since I first picked up a digital pen four years ago and started creating my own illustrations online. So, when they reached out in early 2022 I was unbelievably excited to say yes to a creating a collaboration collection with them. The process was surprisingly streamlined and I felt incredibly supported by the team at CASETiFY that helped me sign on and negotiate the terms of my contract. I worked one on one with a single representative from CASETiFY who was always on the other end of an email if I had any questions about the process along the way and helped me plan my launch around my other work commitments so that it wouldn't become overwhelming for me.
inspiration behind the designs...
After onboarding with CASETiFY they sent me a guideline pack to help me get started, this included lots of information about the kind of styles and designs that were currently trending and how I might take my creative style and make it work with what's popular right now. One of the styles that really inspired me were the cases that had lots of little illustrations, rather than a singular image design or quote - they reminded me of decorating the cover of my school diary with stickers or how in college people would often cover the front of their laptop with different stickers. I thought it would be fun to play on this idea of stickers and add little uplifting reminders to the so that every time someone picked up their phone or AirPods cases they found little words of encouragement.
seeking visual inspiration...
Designing the illustrations for my CASETiFY collection coincided with my big rebrand this year, so I knew that this collection was going to be the first thing that I worked on that would really bring together my old style with my new branding. I already had a lot of mood boards created for my rebrand, so I used a lot of the images from these to get inspiration for the collection designs and colours. I also looked at work from other artists and illustrators that I admire, such as Oliver Jeffers and Lisa Congdon, to study how they bring playfulness and inspiration together in a meaningful way. For weeks my studio walls were covered in cut outs and print outs of illustrations, colour palettes, stickers and other phone case designs all of which fed into my own ideas to help create the collection designs.
creating the final design files...
The actual design process for these cases took a few weeks; first I sketched out icon/motif ideas for the different images and objects that might work as sticker designs. I took inspiration from my mood boards for these as well as elements of my own illustrations that are common to a lot of what I create such as rainbows, daisies and stars. I then created illustrations of each of these 'sticker' images in Procreate before importing them into Illustrator to vectorise them.
The next step was creating a list of quotes or phases that would feature on the cases; I had a notes page on my phone that I just kept adding ideas to for a few days. At first I had lots of phrases like "you're doing great" or "you've got this" but then my fiancé suggested to try some of them from the first person so that when people read them they get an affirming statement about themselves such as "my best is enough" and in the end I went with this direction.
Once I had narrowed down my list of quotes to include in the designs I had to match each phrase with a sticker illustration; all of this happened in illustrator where I used one of my custom fonts to generate the phrases and then resize them and rotate them to fit around the different illustrations.
The final step was generating the different case design files; this process took at least a week on it's own, because for each type of device I had to create a new template and set of designs. In the end I created around 10-15 phone case design files, 16 files for AirPod designs, 8 air tag designs, 2 iPad designs, a MacBook case design and an Apple Watch strap. I then had to upload each of these files onto the CASETiFY website and generate previews and mockups of the different devices cases; some designs were cut at this point because they didn't work with both iPhone and Samsung devices, but after a few more days of tweaking and chatting over and back with the rep I was working with at CASETiFY, the collection was ready to submit.
final feelings on the collection...
A lot of hours of work went into creating these designs, a lot more than I actually expected, just because the file generating process was a bit painstaking in order to make sure each of the different designs worked with all the different case options CASETiFY offer. However, when I saw the cases in reality for the first time, all those hours of work suddenly were worth it because I knew that these cases were going to bring joy to SO many others. It is literally a dream come true to see my work featured on the CASETiFY website and every time I receive a message or photo of someone else's order arriving it fills my heart with so much joy. Working on this collection is definitely going to be one of my highlights of 2022.
