Here on the blog, I want to share more local design that inspires the heck out of me. I absolutely adore the illustration in the Celtic Colours brand, and one of these days would like to pick the brain of its designer, Neil Gascoyne for Vibe Creative Group. Check out the Vibe portfolio page for the backstory on this brand, including seeing the original logo that Vibe modernized.

I love how the brand is both clean, and yet also full of life and movement. I love the way you can feel the swoosh of wind through the woman's hair and in the leaves, and the way her hand and arm echo the curve of the fiddle bow. It's graceful, and gorgeous.

As I just got back from a trip to Maine (and Halifax and Fredericton on the way there and back, respectively), I'm looking forward to the weekend to relax and won't be taking in any Celtic Colours shows this year. Luckily, though, you can livestream through the website! So I might just have to give that a try.

Do you take in Celtic Colours shows? What are your thoughts on the brand?

Hey WHOA, it's October already. This year, man, it's flying by! (#thingspeoplesayeveryyear)

So here I am, getting into the blogging groove again. Or I guess it's more like, I'm climbing into the groove with this post, and then I'll stay in it.

Anyway, I really want to share more Behind the Scenes on my work with you all! Today I'm sharing my process for making an Instagram graphic I did recently, for a photo challenge project.

#OctoberImpressions2016 is a collaboration between myself and four other Instagrammers. It got started because I tried a photo challenge in August that was created by Susannah Conway (#augustbreak), and my friend Yvette reached out to me to ask if there was going to be another one soon. Susannah isn't doing another one until December, but I have always wanted to create a photo challenge, and I thought it would be cool to do it in collaboration.

So, in early September, I asked Yvette and another gal Nicole, and they said yes! Then Nicole added her friend Kelly into the mix. And we were four.

The name, October Impressions, was Yvette's idea, and we all liked it, although we kicked around some other ideas too.

We each came up with a quarter of 31 prompts. Then I put them in an order that I thought made sense, trying to put prompts around times (like Canadian Thanksgiving, and Halloween, and Celtic Colours) that suited them, and also trying to break up the prompts from their original lists.

Then it was time to make the graphic that we would use to start the challenge off. I was at yoga one day and saw this beautiful plant on the windowsill. I thought it would make a nice background, so I snapped a photo of it with my phone.

I started designing the graphic in Photoshop, thinking of Photoshop's Save for Web feature, but quickly realized as I was laying out the list of prompts that I really wanted InDesign's mastery with text. Photoshop really doesn't have that - it doesn't have a function for making bulleted or numbered lists. So I switched over and started a new document in InDesign.

I wish I could say that I sketched all this out beforehand, but honestly I didn't. I basically dropped in the image, and worked on it in the program, making the rectangle, playing with fonts, and moving everything around. Writing this post makes me realize I want to do more sketching beforehand, and also take in-progress shots: next time!

However, I did do a "mock sketch" for this post, which was fun and made me think that maybe sketching on paper could save me time, next time.

Fonts used in the end graphic are Roboto Slab and Pugsley.

So then we posted the graphic to our Instagram accounts on September 30, and now we're five days in to the challenge. It's really neat to see other people besides the original four taking part too, and see the hashtag filling up with photos. You can follow me on Instagram here to see what I'm doing each day for the challenge. The other gals who made the challenge with me are: Yvette, Nicole and Kelly. And, of course, you're more than welcome to play along - we'd love that.

If you have any questions about creating Instagram graphics or about photo challenges, leave a comment below! I'd love to hear from you.