Vicky Yorke Designs

My agents, Jewel Branding & Licensing will again be exhibiting my designs at Surtex in New York and Licensing Expo in Las Vegas later this month. This year Surtex runs from May 21st - 23rd and Licensing Expo from May 23rd - 25th. With both shows happening back to back for the first time, I've been super busy updating my portfolio with fresh new designs!  All of my designs begin as hand drawings, so for months now I have been drawing, drawing, drawing - which has been wonderful! Here are a few examples - You can see more by following my  Instagram  @vickyyorkedesigns where I have documented much of my preparation for the shows.  I am so inspired by the sea and recently took a working holiday to the coast to do more sketching and to provide some last minute inspiration for new collections. I'm now in the final stage of preparation, pulling all of my patterns together and creating product mock-ups. Below is a sneaky peak at some of my collec...

As a designer I often get asked how I create my images and if I draw everything by hand. I thought it might be fun to answer these questions in this blog post to give you a quick overview of the process of how I work to create my designs.  At the moment I'm working on a new range of greetings cards, which is something a bit different for me... but the process for each design is similar to how I work for creating all surface pattern designs or placement graphics for products. The starting point is always an idea. Sometimes this comes in the form of a client brief and sometimes it's the spark of an idea in my head. For these greetings cards I decided I wanted to create a range of cards based on my existing typography range, 'Well Hello There!', but with sentiments that were more focussed on the greetings card market. Often at this stage I create an ideas board, but because the look of the new range is to follow existing designs I simply reviewed the existing work...

Today is the first day back for many UK schools after the long summer break. Part of going back for me was always the excitement of buying new school stationery - I have always LOVED buying new pens and trying them out to see what effects I can create! My first design job was working in-house for stationery company, Helix, which was so much fun as I got to work on all the new product development for all their lovely back to school stationery each year. The company is now Maped-Helix , but they remain one of my favourite freelance clients as the design briefs they give me are always so creative and fun! Maped-Helix recently sent me some of their 'Graph'Peps' fine point pens to try out, which come under their Maped brand.* In honour of the back to school period I thought I would make a little doodle film to show what they are like to draw with. The film shows the first time I used them, so you can see I took to them quite easily - they allow lots of control. My favour...

Following on from the success of Surtex in New York last month, my agents, Jewel Branding & Licensing will be exhibiting at another major art licensing show this week - Licensing Expo in Las Vegas, which runs from 21st - 23rd June. I've been extremely busy preparing for this show over the last few months and in addition to my portfolio shown at Surtex, I have now added over 50 brand new pieces of art including repeat patterns, illustration and typography! These pieces add to existing ranges, as well as making up 6 completely new themed ranges, with designs suitable across many different product areas. There are designs for everyday including my 'Geometrico' range, which was developed from sketchbook doodles created while travelling around Italy earlier in the year ( - shown above). 'Mosaic' (- below) is loosely inspired by the current trend for colouring book art and mixes black and white geometric line drawings with bright pops of colour for a really f...