National Pencil Day

Yay! It's the 30th March and... oh Hello Sweet Pea... it's National Pencil Day! OMG!  ✏️❤️

Pencils mean a lot to us as a lot of our creativity, sketches, ideas all started with them. Our sweet pea to not to forget. Dedicating to the humble pencil on #PencilDay.

Thanks to our Instagram friend @366cards for reminding us of this lovely day. She has made the loveliest card inspired by our Crisps pencils to celebrate this lovely pencil day! Pssst... Don't forget to check out @366cards on Instagram. It's so creative - a national day is celebrated each day of the year with something special that she has created in a form of a card. Just look at the picture below - isn't it totally ace bananas! 🖖🍌🎉 Simply - follow worthy!

Image courtesy of @366cards on Instagram - Pencil Card to celebrate National Pencil Day

Tree Massive - Grow the Tallest Tree in Instagram

Christmas is full of fun, cheer and Christmas Tree!  🎅🏻🎄

On Instagram we have recently been contacted by New Future Graphic (NFG Studio) - A London based full service Creative Agency, as they have started a very fun and creative grow a Christmas tree project on Instagram called "Tree Massive".

What does the Tree Massive project involve?

Digitally we need to decorate, create, embellish 3 Instagram squares - i.e. Three different Christmas tree image layers to help stack up the digital tree and make it grow tall, massively, fun and colourfully! YAY! This type of project is right up our alley - as it has all the fun factor and we like to create digital illustrations.

What did we create?

We stayed conventional, as we love baubles on Christmas trees. We decided to use our own hands to create the baubles and using the concept of dove hand shadows by overlapping our hands to make "Dove Hand Shaped" baubles - signifying peace, love and cheerfulness. After which we fasten these baubles to the trees with neon fluorescent ribbons. It's a combination of black and white photography, and some illustration - mix and matching.

Oh did we say that we also spread the rainbow hues across the 3 Instagram tree layers? 🌈🖌 

Interested? What do you need to do? 

Join this fun and festive project!

• Head to Tree Massive's website http://www.tree.construction (we even absolutely love how creative the web address is 🎄😋🎅🏻💻)
• Read the instructions available and download the templates
• Start creating
• Submit your 3 tree layers back to contact@newfuturegraphic.co.uk
• Wait and see the tree grow! 
• 👀 Take note! Quick quick there is still a bit of time as deadline is 21st December, 2015 and they will top the star on the tree! 🎄✨ 

Happy creating!  

New 3 Pack

We have been enjoying working on collaborations. One of our latest is with The Clever Badger. They are a super duper cute company, based in Kent that sells an array of very fun cards, stationery and gifts. In addition, they have a monthly subscription box of goodies called "Badger Box".

Back in May we started a conversation on working together on a customised item for their themed boxes. (Hooray!!! We are absolutely chuffed to bits.) The theme was Office Life - Working Nine to Five.

To suit budget and the purpose of the gift box, we worked on new packaging for a set of 3 pencils, as our standard size has so far been a pack size of 6.

We are so pleased to see how the new pack size turns out after a few rounds of testing with our peel and seal plastic bag manufacturer in Nottingham, which works at the speed of lightning in terms of turnaround - absolutely awesome manufacturer. A big thank you to them!

Last but not least, the printing of new paper pencil band wrappers to fit the new pack size. YAY! Et voila - we have a new pack size of 3 pencils. 

If you are interested to have your own set of 3 pencils, please contact us via our Contact Us page and we look forward to working together with you on your ideas. 

On Board the London Underground

Choo choo! Our London Underground pencils have been awarded a royalty license registration number by the Transport of London. Hence, the pencils are a licensed product by Transport of London.

In terms of design, we are allowed to include the iconic Underground Roundel logo, and use the specific New Johnston font that is used specifically for London Underground onto our pencils and packaging.

Moving forward, all the new packaging of the London Underground pencils will contain the registration number. Our awarded number is Transport for London Registered User No. 15/5062.

Thank you to the Commercial Licensing team of the Transport of London for guiding us through the royalties process. Yay!

Sow Blooming Plants

Ey up duck! Daylight Savings this weekend, 1 less hour to decide what to plant. SOW... why not follow our guide from our new English Gardener's Pencils Set :

The colours of our pencils are designed to reflect the actual petals and stamen.

The plants and the flowers chosen that are perfect for Gardeners or if you have friends that are interested in botany. This include:

• Poppy (red petals, and black stamen)
• Daffodil (yellow outer petals, and orange inner petals)
• Forget me Not (blue petals and yellow stamen)
• Sweet Pea (lilac petals and purple stamen)
• Cactus (green stem and silver white spikes) 
• Venus Flytrap (green leaves and red flowers)

Have a bloomtastic weekend + P.S. Forget me Not.

OMG 1 week to Top Drawer

We are 1 week away from our first trade fair at Top Drawer London . Excited! Just couple of days into the new year and it's been H-E-C-T-I-C , we have officially entered status "Busy Bee Land". 

First off, we are getting new products ready. Yay! New product launch. From the lovely feedback we have received from our customers at Old Street we are attempting to push out new products in 2 weeks ( yes, with the holidays in between... eek! slightly mad but we have got to just try it ) , designing our product catalogue and also prepping for our stand. I AM A mad smiley!

Ok. Now, product catalogue. Must fess up, it was not straight forward in deciding which products to include into the catalogue , here's the trail of thoughts :

1. Top sellers from Old Street
2. Fun factor
3. Eeny, meeny, miny, mo ( Yup, you betcha -  We run out of juice and reasons too. )

For the product catalogue cover design, we will include a shade of Green. Yum! So far, green has not really been a featured colour in I AM A, maybe it's time. N'est-ce pas?

Here's a glimpse of the product catalogue cover, with a seamless striped pattern :

P.S. Eternally grateful to all the suppliers, printers, whom have given us time slots to make sure our new products, catalogues are delivered on time for Top Drawer.

I AM A Stationery Gift Store Opens at London Old Street Underground

Yay! I AM A Stationery Gift store has arrived at London Old Street Underground station! We are OPEN - hip hip hooray! 

For our pop up store design, this is our approach : our stationery gift products are colourful, we wanted to create an ambience of a book store where people can enjoy and take time to immerse into the products and have a good giggle at it. Hence, we have taken a more white "clinical" approach to the asethetics to the store.

White back wall, plywood shelves with white metal brackets - a clean background to display the multi color block English Idioms notebooks.

Clear see through pyrex clinical beakers as pencil stands for the themed pencil sets, natural color peg board for our alphabet wall to fit the alphabet badges from A to Z.

Neon pink vinyl to display our range of products like a menu, and also our I AM A photo wall to allow people to express themselves and tell us their state of mind. And of course, smiley. He appears at the light box, with one side of the light box being the logo and the other being smiley so that he smiles at all the commuter to Old Street Underground station.

Here's some photos of the store, come visit us and have fun. We are only here for 2 weeks till the 14th December 2014.

Our store front, yay, baby - we have all your stationery gifts ready for gifting!

Neon pink vinyl menu on the side wall 

Our white paper carrier bag packaging. We have received a lot of awesome love from it and great comments. Every one had a good smile from it, we even had a number of offers just to buy the carriers. Pretty flattered.

We love to make you smile - smiley smiling to all commuters to Old Street Underground station! Yipppeee!

It's the gifting season. Gift stationery this Christmas and we will happily tailor your christmas gifts to your budget.

We would like to thank the Appear Here team for preparing and coordinating the lease for us, London Underground to let us make you smile at Old Street Underground station. and Love Print who applied our lovely neon pink cut vinyl.

I AM A Stationery Gift Store Old Street Pop Up Store : London Underground Invite

3 weeks to go to the launch of our Pop Up store at Old Street. It's our first time running a pop up store, ( yes ... and definitely getting the heebie jeebies ) to showcase I AM A.

Yay, the invites!  We have designed both a digital format of the invite ( yes! with animation of course ) and a hard copy post card size invite.

We will be in Old Street Underground station, and a lover of the London Underground who loves to commute on it. We took inspiration from the London Underground tube map and made our invite out of it. The digital animated version is a travelling one ( woohoo ! ) - he he with a pink smiley circle dot traveling around the tube lines ! Secretly, if there were a tube line for I AM A... ( we do day dream big )  it will surely be a stripy Neon Pink line called "Smiley Express" and the stop for our store will be Smileville. 

P.S. You are invited. Don't forget to bring your invite with you, as you get a discount with it at the store!