Valentines
Most years in recent memory, I have designed a valentine and sent it to everyone I know. Here is a selection from the archive of Valentines past.
2021 Valentine
Concept: Hearts at Home - An inventory of heart-shaped items in my apartment. (Inspired by stay-at-home orders, a new experience for all of us in 2020.)
2020 Valentine
Concept: Blizzard (my dog-nephew) tucked into the corner of the couch. (Inspired by true events)
2019 Valentine
Concept: Heart-shaped leaves. I visited the United States Botanic Garden in early February and photographed every heart-shaped leaf I saw.
2018 Valentine
Concept: An introverted giraffe wearing a turtleneck that matches his own heart-shaped spots. (Collaboration with Mark Hannallah)
2017 Valentine
Concept: Animals that have multiple hearts. I learned about worms having five hearts from a work cafeteria milk carton, and discovered two additional multi-heart animals via internet search. (The small number of animals fitting this bill is why hagfish made the cut!)
Work Valentine Concept: Use our new method of web component documentation to create a valentine message. In appreciation of the fact that one of our web components was officially named “nav ribbon” I ordered actual ribbon customized with its name. (Note – after I placed the order, we changed the name of nav ribbon, so the valentine contained an anachronism by the time February 14th arrived.)
Early prototype on the left, final on the right.
2016 Valentine
Work Valentine Concept: Celebrate the fact that USA TODAY’s hex color contains the string “BFF,” and that beyond being simply coworkers, we were a close-knit team of friends.
(I couldn’t find a picture of this one by itself so please forgive the duplicate of 2017’s work valentine!)
2015 Valentine
Galentine Concept: Repurpose a favorite line from Friends into a valentine-successory hybrid. (This quote comes from a self-help tape Chandler listens to at night to help him quit smoking.)
2012 Valentine
Student Valentine Concept: My fourth grade writing students (this was pre-design-career for me) had just learned what palindromes were and were understandably fascinated by them. I created a palindome-entine for each of them.