After being contacted by the library, I set to work on thumbing out ideas for my design. I had come up with a lot since I started corresponding with them. Anything to do with imagination, reading and adventure, those were the themes I settled on. It's what I enjoyed about reading as a kid and I tried to tap into that as I came up with these. After this, the client picked three they liked the most from the designs and I set to work on fleshing them out.
At this point, I wasn't sure how far I should push with each to make them more finalized, but I decided in order to sell either of these three's core ideas of imagination, wonder and adventure - I would need to go bananas on them. So I naturally tried to make them as close to the finished design without being super clean with it. Loose as I could be. My contact at the library then proceeded to show it off to the kids and staff and get a public poll on what was the most striking and fun.
And those, it came down to this final design of Dragon Flight. I was actually very excited to work on this one, dragons are cool and kids love dragons, end of story!
The way this uploaded lines up perfectly with my design, but as you can see it turned out pretty well in card form! They went with two other artists as well, Greg Schmidt and Enya GieBen. I haven't been in contact with them through out this process but I think their cards came out very well too! : D Sun Prairie now has a nice diverse selection of cards to choose from for the kids that go their to read, and that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy on the inside.
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Sun Prairie Library Card Project

This project was a big freelance gig for me, personally, since I grew up on reading books from the library. I was contacted earlier last year to design a card sticker for them which later turned into a card design for print! It was an amazing process and full of creative thinking and good communication between me and my client. I hope the kids are enjoying their fancy new cards, I know I sure wish I was nearby to get one myself!

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Jeffrey Johnson
Freelance Illustrator Superior, WI