typography love

im a bit of a font nerd. i really get a kick out of identifying the fonts in the end credits of movies. but moreover my love for helvetica, is the soft spot i have for hand drawn type.  im working on a few christmas gift and when searching for some inspiration i came across beau ideal's etsy shop and found this beautiful calendar. gorgeous hand drawn type of cultural and iconic celebrities in their birthday month. all hand screen printed in brooklyn.

School Age Notes + TreeTreeTree + Owls Say Congrats

In between busy work schedules, we've managed to design and create three new irresistibly adorable Popote cards! Head on over to our etsy shop to check out the new vinyl greeting cards that have just been added! If you were one of the many awesome people that were able to make it to the Capsule Design Festival, you may have seen these cards at our booth (see pics below!). We got a lot of great feedback, and hope that you all adore them just as much as we do!

And just a reminder, for a few days we had sold out of Sweet Calavera cards, but we've since made more, so make sure to check those out as well!

After we've all voted today (which we hope you all do as well), Popote is getting together to talk about new designs for the upcoming holidays, so we'll make sure to keep you posted.

Happy Voting!

See more pictures of these cards

Lovely Dancers

Here are a few shots of Squid Dance, the new Popote card up at our shop!

Junia and I have been wanting to come up with another squid design ever since we completed our very first card, Squidigree. We wanted to come up with a design that could be used for any occasion. We had "wedding card" in mind but also had "happy birthday". As you can see (from these lovely photos we took in our back-slash-front yard) we decided to use the mint on copper color combo as a happy birthday card while the other more neutral color combo, was going to be left as a blank card.

Vamanos Popote!

Clamshell iBook

I know I know I know, those pictures we have on our Etsy shop are a bit cheesy. You might be surprised to know that we don't actually know those people we have in these product photos. 

But here's the real deal! We covered an Apple iBook with our Clamshell decal. The process was quite easy and only took a few mins. I love vinyl because you can chop it up and piece it back together with out really noticing. It bends and won't lift unless you really pick at it. A few days after we put the decal on, we happened to be at a local coffee shop here in our neighborhood and definitely got some looks! We've got more home decal designs coming soon!

And remember, if you buy one of our decals, we always send you a tester so you can test it out on your surface and make sure everything will be OK. 

Happy Birthday Mariachi!

Hola friends. We just put up our new birthday card on the etsy shop. 

Click here to see more of the card pics. Here's the etsy description:

"Bring the banda to the next birthday party with this chiquito Mariachi! This birthday card is a modern throw-back to birthday traditions and no matter who you are or what culture you love, this card will put a smile on that birthday friend's face!"

Junia and I were inspired by our last trip to Chula Vista to visit our families. My dad's uncle was having a surprise 90th birthday party in Imperial Beach and we got to have some fun with a mariachi band that performed. I grew up going to weddings and quinceneras in Tijuana and SD and no matter how much I pretended to hate Mariachi music when I was a kid, there's was no denying the pure fun and tradition that the band brings to family events. Here's some pics we took at the party with our trusty Diana cam!

The Popote Blog

While both Junia and I have our own blogs out in space, we needed to create this new blog for Popote. However, there's already too much going on in our lives so to consolidate a little bit, I'll be stopping Soundslikeyouandme and will be regularly posting here (at least trying to). So I look forward to sharing current news about Popote as well as the things that are inspiring us.

Experimenting

One great comment we got when we were first selling our vinyl cards and decals was to make decals for bikes. Up here in SF there's a lot of cyclers (me being one).

So this is a page from my moleskine of some quick ideas.

This is a scan and mirror of one of two designs.

This is the second design with the vectorized first pattern.

This is after it is plotted and picked.



















I have a stainless steel water bottle that I decided to decorate since it sits around my job. I thought it would be a good test to see how well the vinyl will hold up after these aspects: The bottle sweats a little from cold water, traveling with the bottle in my back pack, constantly picking up the bottle and setting it down.

So far, it's been holding super well. I've had a friend install the vinyl to her bike and I'll check back with her in a few weeks to see how it's going. We will definitely be coming up with more bike decals if these tests work out well. Good thing about these bike decals is that they won't mess with your paint job and should come off smoothly. The vinyl is water resistant so having it on a bike left outside in the SF rain or fog shouldn't harm it. They should last up to a year and more on your bike, easy.

We'll keep you posted!

Viva Popote!

Well, this is exciting! We finally decided to bring Popote into the blogging world, in hopes that it helps us generate more cards n' things to sell. We each have our own blog that we struggle to update, so we'll see how this goes. First off, Hello amigos!

Here's a brief summary of where Popote has taken us, and what we hope it becomes:

Our first release out into the world came at SF Zine Fest where we had a table set up with our cards and a few home decals.

It was an exciting time for us, considering we stayed up until four in the morning making sure everything was put together, and in its nice little cello sleeve. There weren't too many crafts at this event, but it seemed like a good thing; it let us branch out to a different audience and get feedback. We had a few buys, and lots of questions being asked about how we make our cards. Do you want to know how Popote makes their cards, and why they are so unique?

1. We sketch out the designs, scan them and then turn each line into a vector line
2. The color of vinyl that we're going to use on the card for the design gets chosen
3. The vectorized design gets put through a vinyl cutting machine (like a printer

except it has a small blade instead of ink thats cuts the design onto the roll

of vinyl that we've feed the machine)

4. Once it's done cutting, we have a whole sheet of vinyl that needs to be picked by hand

using an x-acto knife

5. The designs are picked out, topped with a sheet of contact paper, then carefully placed

on the card stock

6. The back of the card is then stamped using our hand carved Popote stamp, and ready

to share with you

Following the event, we quickly put all our cards and decals on an ESTY shop for anyone

to buy, which you can shop at here. We've since been working on new designs and going about

making Popote a real business. The paperwork end of it seems somewhat stressful, but it's

proving to be exciting at the same time. We've always been really creative people that have

loved spending the time to make things and give them away, so it was only a matter of time

that we got our act together to form Popote!