A Few Photos

CCF offers free medical care to the surrounding community. It's incredible, honestly. We have doctors on hand that perform minor surgeries on site. This little monkey had a high fever for two days. The doctor said she'd be just fine.

This is the CCF bakery, the day a bunch of chef's were graduating. It's a huge warehouse with ovens and classrooms. Smells amazing and the students cook loaves of bread that are given out for FREE to the community every day.

Found this little guy while teaching some CCF kids a short class on disposable film basics. I had to draw out a canister of film to illustrate what film means. The kids were looking for USB drives to stick the disposable into the camera...insanity.

Holiday Special

One of my first assignments at Cambodian Children's Fund - the Holiday Campaign. 

once i figured out how our happy holiday concepts would look, i created 4 different styles we'd use for our holiday cards. when you purchase a gift, you're forwarded a card that says thanks.

My first few weeks at the new job have been exciting. I shot Tony Hawk when he came to visit his sponsor child of 7 years. I designed a huge banner for a student party and set up a design request form for internal purposes. The holiday campaign came up quick and I suggested a face-lift.

I have nothing but positives to say about my new position and life. I get to produce designs, photos, videos; I have full creative freedom to come up with interesting ideas and campaign concepts; my boss is a designer himself and very laid back while still interested in exploring new creative caveats; but the best part is that I use my communication skills to help kids.

Below is my holiday campaign work. You can view it live for a month here: www.cambodianchildrensfund.org/gifts-that-matter

first, i drafted a few happy holiday concepts, playing with colors and shapes. we didn't want anything too Chirstmas-y, but we still wanted it to feel like a holiday card.

for the holiday cards, i used existing images in our database and gave them a new funky tone to go with the retro design. i also shot each product and added the shots to the design to create an realistic element to the gift campaign. 

i also designed 11 FB covers for each day we wanted to showcase a new Gift That Matters. 

here's how the homepage looks on our website (which we will be redesigning soon). i designed a button, a banner image and a few small elements that stick out of the homepage.

here's a detail of the inside page where you can purchase a gift. with images of the actual gift you're buying plus the pictures of the beneficiaries, you really get a good idea of what you're investing in. 

Communicating Science - design process

This is the first draft of an infographic I made for a research organization. I'm including the different stages this design went through for several reasons. I find that designing for a new client can be very challenging. I've never designed for IWMI or a research organization before. My initial design (see below) is extremely different than what was actually printed.

I think with sites like Dribbble, it's easy for designers to glamorize their work. What we see on Dribbble and other show-off sites like Designspiration.com are incredible and inspirational. But I wonder how many of the designs on those sites actually end up being used by clients.

I like the challenge of creating a design my client loves and that I would also be happy to put in my folio. I find the best jobs are those that give me both freedom and restrictions. The best part of the creative process for me is after the first draft is painstakingly revealed to my client. I've learned so much by letting go and listening. The clients I work with have great input and if I listen, my designs are get better.

Go figure.

I also signed up on Forrst, an online community for developers and designers aimed at providing solid feedback on work. I put this design up as my first post and this design was picked as a "Ranger Pick" which I guess is their way of saying good job. Here's a link to my work on Forrst: https://forrst.com/people/SaraSayami There's a great discussion on font size.

Below is the 2nd rough draft of the design above. I sent first draft to my client and it was well-received, but there were oh-so-many changes. Font changes, content changes, color changes, and layout changes...

rough draft 2

You can see how different the first and second drafts are. I tried to design something with a clean, corporate style while still engaging the audience. 

I'm living in Nepal. We don't have electricity for about 12 hours out of each day. We don't have nice printers. We don't have nice paper. Since I had never made a poster that was 48 inches, I wanted to make sure my 15pt text was large enough and my 150pt text was not too big. I went to a printer in Kathmandu who I knew printed black and white building plans and asked if he could print my A0 design. Below is the outcome. It cost me $4.00 and an immense amount of confidence. Completely different looking at the same design on a 12-inch computer screen...I recommend printing the entire piece, whenever you can, as often as you can - within reason. 

check out how big these are...had no idea an A0 was so large.

Here are the final 2 designs. One is geared towards gender and one is a general poster about the organization I did these for.

There is  one more version coming...one for online purposes and a more general audience.

Book Design and Layout

I've been working with SPRINT Initiative out of Malaysia for the past few months on a Facilitator's Manual. In the beginning, I created a concept-design for a book or manual that would help the facilitator's focus more on teaching. SPRINT has printed the first draft of this 400-page book and I am hoping to attend the next facilitator training in the Philippines so that I can make changes to the manual that will drastically improve the design. Below are the proposed cover, beginning chapter pages and an example of a content page. All of the content is from a previous design.

In order to make this design easier for the facilitator's to understand and use, I created a set of icons that correspond to the different activities that will be used during the training. I also added a time and date indicator to the header of each page to inform the facilitator's of where they are (or should be) in the training.

Cover for SPRINT Facilitator's manual.

Chapter opening pages

Content example

Film Southasia Designs

I've been working hard with FSA [filmsouthasia.org] for the past few weeks to get ready for the documentary film festival. We're doing standies, flex prints, schedules, invitations, web stuff...everything design. The best part of this experience has been seeing my designs in very large quantities. The schedule (below) was printed 3,000 thick and the 60-page catalog had 500 copies. It's been fun, hard, and challenging. I will post official designs once everything is printed.

KTM street art

finished a video for Katie Green yesterday (katiegreenartist.com.) she's an incredible artist, one i am proud to have worked with. i challenged myself to think outside of the box on this video. i wanted something more edgy and a bit less-traditional in the storytelling arena. in the end, i think we came out with somethink Katie likes and i was proud to publish. what do you think?

Katie Green: Street Art in Kathmandu from sara holcombe on Vimeo.

MyNepalTrip.com

Finished this a while back, but needed to add it to the blog. Here is the front page and below are a couple of details. It's still being coded, but I really enjoyed this job. It went through many drafts and I was told from the first draft that it was too, "French" looking. I listened to my clients and really tried to make it less French. They liked this in the end.

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Hotel search results page.

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Pretty gold search engine detail.

Fashion: The Buddha Does Not Approve

An artist and costume designer asked me to shoot a few of her in a dress she  made. Sounded kinda exciting. She sent me a zipped file of all her previous dresses and they are quite stunning reflections of nature melded into wearable art. In one shot she looks like a piece of forest with moss on her head. 

The piece she wanted me to shoot was a dress made entirely of Buddhist prayer flags. At the Monkey Temple in Swoyambhu, we were instantly greeted with dirty looks and a comment from a woman who said, "She can't do that." I started to get a tad bit nervous as we are in a developing country where religion is taken very seriously. I've seen placid situations escalate into mass maiming in a nano second in Kathmandu and I was sure we didn't want to see that.

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I told her we should shoot what we can and get out quickly. Seems like this won't fly for too long. So we shot about two scenes and a monk appeared at her side. "No no no no no," was all he snarled at her as he ripped off some of her flags. He was very angry. So I shuttled our human prayer flag into a bathroom and she changed quickly while the masses got riled up behind us on the stupa.

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I'm caught in the middle on this one. Because I get it. I really do. And I'm not in love with fashion, ever. But those prayer flags are made in a factory by common men and women with common tools. 

Yet feet are very unholy and truly the dirtiest, at times, in Nepal. Even to point a foot at someone is considered disrespectful. So I understand how blasphemous walking on flags that signify prayers to god sounds.

It was an interesting experience either way.  

The Rise of RS MOTO

So, my husband builds bikes. He takes old machines and breathes life into them. It's not usual for KTM. I'd say he's one of the only people doing it in town, really doing it. He's on his third bike with 3 more orders on the way. We're hoping he can continue this work in Sri Lanka were we've found an abundance of classic bikes and cars.

These are a few of my favorite images from our recent photo shoot. You can see most of the take here on my [Facebook Page.]

Stay tuned, RS MOTO is on it's way up. Video and more coverage to come soon.

the pasta (and more) maker

This is Bubu Candiani. He makes beautiful pasta and lasagna. He learned everything from his mom in Nothern Italy. Today I'm shooting Laxman, the bread maker.

KTM - Vender Profiles

I have the exciting privilege of shooting portraits of all the venders for the KTM Farmer's Market over the next couple of weeks. I'm working on branding and creating an image for the market so that trust is built around the products and the people who sell them. This is Francois. He makes beautiful cheeses and meats. This week I'm shooting a baker, a honey maker and a pasta maker.

Kathmandu Farmer's Market

just the beginnings...tote bags, vender profiles, FB and more to come.

classic bike and light

UX

This is a fairly large project I've been working on for the past 2.5 months. It's for a large organization in Vientiane, Laos. With my small team, we created an interactive new employee orientation. Some of the highlights include graphic design, 3 corporate style videos and web design. It was quite a large undertaking and I'm still working to complete parts of it.

I took on this job because I wanted to broaden my horizons as a communications producer for NGO's. Communications for NGO's goes beyong just social media. All organizations also have Internal communication needs. I learned alot over the course of this project and ultimately I'm very happy with the final product.

I used my design skills. I learned more about the User Experience and how to create an effective User Interface. I met alot of cool people and ultimately I learned so much about a large, inter-governmental organization.

​Here are just 2 pages of a very large multimedia project for an organization in Vientianne, Laos. 

hearts and tears 2013

Hearts and Tears Pokhara 2012 from sara holcombe on Vimeo.