Back in January, for the first time in living memory I booked and started paying down for a week long holiday to New York in November 2020. The plan was to drop off the cats Melina and Sky to family up north while Tariq and I spent Halloween in the the big apple, Tariq planned to dress up as a Ghostbuster and I was still toying with ideas.
By mid March when the Covid figures were rising we realised it was unlikely to happen so decided to cancel and lost our deposit. Then I spent the best part of 5 months at home, wore no make-up, and became an avid Facebook user. This resulted in me getting heavily into skin care, loosing concept of days/ nights/ weeks, never wearing ‘going out’ clothes and feeling extremely put out by having to pop out, even to the bakery literally 5 minutes around the corner.
In some ways I feel it has been good for me as I have far less desire for things such as handbags and jewellery, instead I want to take care of my skin, cook and bake whilst entertaining friends in my support bubble. This was in fact how BDI came to be, while looking for a creative outlet I offered a close friend my design skills to help with the branding for her business. Looking at the straight forward "Lana-Raé" text based logo we needed the original font used to make some tweaks, so she asked the previous designer for the name of the font he used, to which he replied he'd drawn the font himself freehand and had it scanned so couldn’t help. I wasn’t buying it so I did a font finder search and within 2 minutes I found the exact font in question. We were both shocked by his deplorable behaviour, I decided to make a note in the same font for my friend to send him reading:
This made me realise there was a need for honest, no bullsh*t creative services with complete transparency and how BDI was conceived. Branding + Design + Illustration read like beady eyes (BDI) which inspired the original logo design. Shortly afterwhich Beadie and Beanie were born and now appear in a multitude of guises on our IG account @bdi_services.
So instead of being in New York right now, I’m in London, under lockdown growing a media agency alongside Tariq with the cats while riding out the storm of this pandemic and I can honestly say I wouldn’t have it any other way. 🤓