Vicky Yorke Designs

Halloween is nearly upon us, so it's the perfect time to share my brand new range for ' Spookily Does It! ' An extension of the highly successful 'Sweetly Does It' brand, 'Spookily Does It' puts an all new and slightly creepy twist on baking and partyware for the halloween season! It was so much fun creating a range for kids - a great opportunity to play with a bright and gaudy colour pallet that I wouldn't normally get away with(!) and a chance to design some cute Halloween characters! For the 'party in a box' product brief I extended my design to look like a haunted house with spooky surprises…!  …There are pop up pieces in the roof of the house so it is more 3D and it turns into a cake pop stand to make the perfect party centre piece! (The tombstone in the below photo was added by the packaging company - although I understand why it was needed due to the box having the dual purpose of also being packaging I wish they had asked me to dr

My third and final new summer range for Cool Movers is called 'Bloom '. This is my favourite of the three ranges because I was asked to add a bit more creativity to the pattern, although it still needed to be relatively simple for the core summer tableware market. As a floral design was required to contrast with the other two ranges, I decided to create a really strong and bold motif that would translate well across both melamine and textile products. Hopefully the design comes across as being fun and playful as I wanted to capture the joy of a picnic in the sunshine. The design is available on melamine plates, bowls and cups, as well as paper napkins and a plastic table cloth. I reinterpreted the large bold floral into a ditsy print to work on picnic bags and rugs... ...but the larger design is picked up again on the packaging. I think that the two pattern scales work together well to add a bit more depth and interest to the range. 

As we head towards the festive season, thoughts are really beginning to turn towards Christmas parties and New Year, so this is a perfect time for my final post about my party range design for ' Mix It' , which would make a perfect fun alternative to traditional Christmas party products!  One of my favourite things about this range is the packaging, which was put together by the very clever  artworkers at Kitchen Craft. They took my illustrations and surface patterns and all of the playfulness that I tried to create on product and extended this onto boxes, labels and belly bands to really bring the range together! I particularly love how they have subtly brought my cross-hatch surface pattern into the packaging using a spot UV finish, (which is basically a varnish effect on a matt background).  There are lots of cocktail and party products available in the 'Mix It' range. For more details click here. Images copyright Kitchen Craft 2012. 

The second part of the 'Mix It' brief was to design a complimentary surface pattern that would go with the illustrations, but be separate to them. This needed to be unisex to go across a range of textile and paper product, so I decided to keep it quite simple with a hand drawn cross hatch effect created with a dip pen. I used the acidic colours from the illustrations to pull the two contrasting looks together. The cross-hatch design is available on neoprene bottle bags, bottle coolers and napkins. Images copyright Kitchen Craft 2012.

In addition to 'Lock In', I was asked to design a second range for the Bar Craft brand, which is now known as 'Mix It' . The brief for this range was to create a fun and playful design for a cocktail / party range that would appeal to young adults. There were two parts to the brief. The first part was to create illustrations of products / objects associated with cocktail making, which were to be used on packaging and some of the products. I wanted to create a strong, yet playful look, so turned to my trusty dip pen and ink to create a set of fluid drawings. I love 'accidental' mark making, so embraced all the ink splatters and smudging that tend to form with this type of illustration. This can be seen to best effect on the cocktail coasters, which come in a set of four. I really took these as the starting point for the whole range, using my favourite vibrant and acidic colours to set the party tone! Images copyright Kitchen Cra

The logo plays an important part in the 'Lock In' range being used as part of the repeat print, stand alone on products such as the bottle beer glass shown above (- this product always makes me smile!) and also on packaging. Therefore I wanted it to be visually strong and to form a decorative image in it's own right. Hopefully, the Victorian padlock in place of the  letter 'O' works as quite a masculine image, while simultaneously reinforcing the idea of tradition.  Products available include beer mats, beer runners, neoprene can and bottle coolers, where the repeat design can be seen in entirety...  There is also a large tray, which I think shows off the design to very good effect! As you can see from the beer glass at the top of this post there was room to have a bit of fun with this range and one product that I really love is the key corkscrew and bottle opener, which was inspired by my key illustration within the repeat desig