I loved the way this looked somewhat tropical with the combination of patterns, but simultaneously limited the color palette to 2 tones each for blue, yellow, and green alike, with a few hints of red.
I kept multiplying the layers of a spiral I had drawn, and I wanted it to stand out, so the complementary blue and orange mixture allowed the green- and yellow-tinted 'OP squiggle' to stand out and not blend in too much. I applied many gradients to both the fills and strokes of layers, trying to manage how many colors I used. When I was almost finished, I threw in another spiral with a lightning bolt design (here it appears as a black arrow with a beige outline) to fill the empty void behind the personal details.
The ultraviolet 'OP squiggle' looked rather bland against a plain white background, so I threw in some curves with a brush stroke look and rearranged the order of layers until I had something that was both readable and artistically expressive without demanding too vast of a color palette.
A.K.A. Hazel Prim, this is a girlier take on the design, incorporating my experimental alias as the cardholder. For this daredevil skier and ballerina, I wanted to create something that evoked both power and flourish. The font for the company name speaks strong but the style of opacity permits perk. Using Google™ Maps, I spent a short period of time locating a building under construction at an ideal place in Washington, the hometown of this thrill-seeking character. I thought the 'OP squiggle' should be more vibrant, so I looked for images that showed ultraviolet light, and what I figured out was that it is captured like neon or lightsabers (white beams with radiant magenta emanation). Illustrator® was not cooperating with the colors I was choosing, and I learned this was because the color settings were CMYK rather than RGB. When I fixed this, I applied the change to the other documents and restored some of their intended glory, but I couldn't help wondering how many colors I had lost that I had custom-picked. I didn't want the background to be ordinary, so I tweaked two of the corners and split it in two, picking a different but similar pattern for the other shape, and tweaking the pen curves of the shape to align with the french curves of the pattern. The most difficult part was making the company name and personal details stand out from the background, so I decreased the background's opacity and tightened the outer glows around each object, multi-layering the company name and nudging the patterns applied.
This squiggle took the longest time of all the variants. I wish I could have shifted the background pattern, but I wasn't sure what that would do to my artboards, and I was running low on time. I thought that 'powerful pink' or 'powerful purple' would make a good color palette, ultimately resolving to pink and gold. When I tested black as my secondary color, it made me think of the fifties poodle dresses and hair salons and dance studios and the like, which does not represent the company I designed. I wanted to say powerful without perky, which is why I also put a sharp bend on the 'P' in the squiggle. This way, it has a right-side-up and an up-side-down, so one way of looking at the card is more pleasing than the other.
When the pattern of the background stood out too much and made the words harder to read, I decreased its opacity, as well as that of the 'OP squiggle.' This design included the widest variety in fonts (4 total). I kept two fonts from a previous design because I felt that since I had put so much care into aligning the role terms, it wouldn't hurt to place it twice. The email is a combination of the two things that describe the character of my pseudonym: for some reason, whenever I write the word 'idea,' I have a habit of capitalizing the 'i,' and I do this often because I have them often; a creator of ideas... an ide-ator? The website is not owned (yet) and it stands for the company name.
