A Tale of Two Banners

Noticed our banner?  Brittany and I are totally loving it--though we didn't have the same vision at first.  Of course two sisters will have occasional disagreements, even sisters that are best friends and business partners like us! Our first official business disagreement arose during our banner photoshoot.

We completed the task after nearly 4 hours (!!!) of photographing all of our inventory in the hot sun, so I'm sure that our desire to get back into air conditioning contributed to our slightly crabby moods, thus priming us to have a minor squabble. We'd happily agreed upon the items to use in our banner photo, including our favorite typewriter, a selection of lovely glassware, and a few paper crafts. We'd also agreed upon the site of our photo backdrop--the weathered wood on our mother's back porch. I began styling first, scattering items above the bunting and overlapping the frame.

Then Brittany chimed in "Doesn't it look a little...kooky?"

Now I admit to you that I am kooky and I fully embrace those parts of my personality.  I sing and use accents at random.  I eat M&Ms in even numbers so that I eat the same number of each color on the left and right sides of my mouth.  On Halloween, I dress up like a Roberts dairy milk carton (my last name is Roberts after all!) And Brittany is also genetically pre-disposed (judging by how our parents and other relatives act) to be a little kooky. 

But hearing my banner design dubbed kooky did not fill me with confidence.  Like a mama cub, I defended my original decision, but Brittany insisted that it felt cluttered.  We agreed to disagree.  We decided we'd each make our own version of the banner and then take our favorite bits from each to blend a final product.  

Since this was a group effort, I'll let Brittany step in here to describe what she liked best about my banner!

First, I totally agreed that the frame looked best on the left, since we planned to add text in there and the eye naturally reads text from left to right. I also loved how Megan had styled the books so that you could see the cool design on the blue book's spine, along with the lovely patterned orange cover. Plus, the stack of mismatched china looked great--I especially loved how the milk glass plate was placed next to the pinwheels so that it almost looked like one of them! I'd been worried that the cluster of glassware up at the top of the frame would make things look too cluttered (or kooky, ha!), but ultimately I love how it turned out! I'm glad that I trusted Megan's judgment on that one. Sometimes we just need to not trust our gut reactions! 

And now back to Megan to describe what was working in my arrangement.

Here is Brittany's banner design:

Adorable, right?  She pulled out a few more of our inventory items to add more color and texture to the photo--a burnished silver teapot and a milk glass pedestal bowl. She also used more pinwheels than my design and I love the punch of color.  The stacked books add dimension.  What you can't see is that she used a Coca-Cola bottle to prop it up--ingenious!  The birdcage is laid on its back, which is a better angle from the camera's bird's eye view.  Back to Brittany!

So with our two different stylings in mind, we decided to create our perfect banner together! Originally we planned to look at the pictures of both of our arrangements and pick the top three things we liked about each to more purposefully fuse them (sorta like the first season of HGTV's Secrets from a Stylist, with two distinct room designs merging together), but then we realized that it made most sense to just jump into styling the photo together. So we removed all of the items and began styling away in tandem. It worked out perfectly! It turns out we naturally implemented things we both liked from each others' design, and we also arranged things in ways we didn't think of at all in our original stylings! We kind of got out our kinks in the first two arrangements, so that things went very smoothly when we united because we really began to trust each others' instincts.

In our joint styling, we returned the typewriter to where Megan had positioned it in the corner--it felt a little cluttered when it was placed next to the chunky frame, and it really draws the eye to that upper corner. We ended up wanting more color, so we popped in a blue-patterned salad plate & amber sherbet cup. Both of us loved how the plate looked when clustered with the pinwheels, so we added the green bowl to bring in more of the sage color to that corner. We also opened up the lunch box, migrated the pinwheels to the corner, and mixed up the items above the bunting for more interest (rather than having all glassware up there).


Now all that was left to do was crop the photo and add our text! I played around a little without Megan and came up with this...

...And then together we decided that we'd like to crop the photo a bit more, place our full name in the frame, and remove the tagline (which we felt made the banner feel a bit cramped). Here's what we ended up with:

And we both love it! I think that styling this shot helped prepare us for any disagreements that may arise when we're setting up an event or just decorating our studio space :) Turns out things really do turn out better when we work together.