Doctor Whimsy: Monogram Help/Armchair Design Advice

Like most things in my life, I'm self-taught in Photoshop and Illustrator. I am lucky to have had a three year stint on my college newspaper as a photographer and editor. It enabled me to work with our page designers and graphics artists, so I picked up a few bits and pieces along the way. While I'd love to post tutorials on how I've made things (not because they're great, but because we could all use a little help with these programs), I'm not the best at screen shots, so I'm not sure how to visually show readers what I am doing.

As a substitute, I just found this neat site, briannanicole's Wedding Monograms tutorials, by way of iDiY (which has been such an amazing addition to the wedding blog world). Obviously, the techniques here are not limited to weddings...there are so many things you can do with these elements, like making your own stationery, gift tags, holiday cards, especially with the ease and beauty of home printers.

A couple of resources for downloading fonts and dingbats (symbols that have been turned into "fonts") - all of these have free downloads, but they are not freeware (which means these things are for personal and not commercial use):

DaFont
HouseofLime
FontSpace
Briar Press
Dingbats-UK

There are many wonderful sites for clip art, some free and some not free:

iStockPhoto (A particular favorite, but this is a pay-for service that has photos - which you can turn into clip art yourself - or actual vector images themselves.)
Clipart ETC (Free from the Florida's Educational Technology Clearinghouse)
Clipart.com (Also a pay-for service)
Dover Publications (the people who made your favorite coloring books), have an extensive collection of clip art. Every Friday they will send you a link to some free clip art to download if you sign up on their sampler page. The quality is not the greatest (in terms of file size), but there are ways around this.

Fonts can be particularly tricky to identify, so Tom told me about these two sites that help you identify fonts: (the first one you upload a sample of the font, the second one asks you questions about the font to help you characterize it without the need to provide a sample):

What the Font?
Identifont

For help with color schemes, see this post about places to look up color palettes and trends. (And pardon my editorializing - I had a hard day in neurology.)

I think the most important thing is to have inspirations for your design. It gets tricky to make sure that you are not out-and-out copying someone else's ideas, but I'll show you a few inspirations for my projects (and the final results):

I really liked the star and the font from 99 Vintage Glam's wedding portrait:

And here's the result:

I liked this flier for a benefit run for Stephanie Nielsen (her story is a whole 'nother blog post, but you can read about her in this NYT article)

And here's the result. I tired to play around with the elements, and this is a work and progress, but it shows how something can become quite different from the inspiration.