Designers, You’re Going to Love This New Mouse

In honor of International Women's Day, we're spending the day with one of our favorite women, content creator Allison Cimo. She’s sharing her tips and tricks for building your own brand using Adobe Express. Allison spends her 9-5 and her 5-9 designing and writing content for work and her personal life. She’s a busy creative who loves her job and recently moved to Los Angeles with her husband and adorable pup.

We followed Allison for a day in her creative space, where she’s working on a few social media assets for Women’s History Month while creating beautiful invites for her best friend’s wedding. “This Women’s History Month, I’m inspired by all of the trailblazing women who came before me in history: The scientists, artists, and thinkers,” says Allison. “The changemakers who made contributions to our society, big and small.”

Check out Allison’s dreamy day-in-the-life video below and be inspired!

How does she bring her inspo to life? Adobe Express makes designing easy with thousands of beautiful templates, plus assets for social media content, logos, and more. “Adobe Express has been a complete game changer for me,” Allison says. “I love being able to pick out the templates that align with my aesthetic or a client's aesthetic. It is essentially a creative jumping off point and saves me so much time, especially on holidays like International Women's Day. It's so fun to scroll through all the templates and add in my own personal touches to celebrate the important women in my life."

Here are more ways Allison fuels her creativity, plus her tips and tricks for all the female creators out there!

Create A Morning Ritual. Start the day by getting into the mindset of being creative without actually being creative. “I always make coffee, eat breakfast (I'm a pour-a-bowl-of-cereal type of girl), and take my pup for a walk, which gets my creative brain going,” says Allison.

Set Goals, Long And Short Term. “I'm very free spirited. I pick up projects that I'm interested in and I'm really guided by my creative brain and heart,” says Allison. Setting goals didn’t come naturally to her as a creative person but she found that it helped her grow her career. “Setting goals gives you guardrails and guidance for where you want to go.” Adobe Express can help you visualize goals with its mood board creator that has professional tools and templates to make a custom mood board in minutes.

Don’t Reinvent The Wheel. “The concept of a blank canvas and starting from absolute scratch is kind of daunting,” says Allison. Adobe Express is like getting help from a trusted designer with thousands of pre-designed templates you can customize, plus the entire Adobe Stock royalty-free photo collection and a full library of Adobe Fonts. It’s an easy tool for editing images, videos, and documents too. “I just love how much you can really customize it,” says Allison, “so that when you're actually finished, it feels like something that you just totally created, even though it was born from a template.”

Get Organized Visually. Creatives are visual people so finding ways to organize in a way that is visually appealing could help you stay organized and save time. “I color code everything,” says Allison. “I have a lot of different types of tasks: brainstorming tasks, executional tasks where I'm actually copywriting or designing and scheduling, admin stuff like reporting, emailing, research. Visualizing what my week or day is going to look like helps me get into the right mindset.” Adobe Express' content scheduler tool also helps Allison stay organized so she can plan, schedule, preview, and publish social content across platforms — all from one place.

Draw Inspiration From Other Women. “I love designing and writing, but I find it so motivating to look at what other creators are dreaming up. I'm always looking to other female creators to inspire me and challenge me to see new perspectives,” notes Allison. "Right now it’s so empowering to be a female creator. I love to seek out other creatives and pay homage to the women who inspire me by visiting female-centered exhibits, reading books, and creating fun social posts on Adobe Express."

Give Yourself Grace. “I always try to be forgiving if I'm just not in the right headspace for being creative,” says Allison. “I think some of that is just being flexible and adaptable and being able to read your mood in the morning.” Sometimes that means leaning into more personal work. “My best friend is getting married this year and I’m so excited to celebrate the incredible, awesome, and inspiring woman that she is. With Adobe Express’ wedding invitation designs, I was able to create stunning invitations for her that I’m absolutely obsessed with. They feel like a true reflection of her.”

Need a creative spark to get the juices going on this International Women’s Day and beyond? Check out Adobe Express for loads of inspirational designs, templates, and tools to help unlock your creativity. Easily make anything you need, all in one place!

Video Direction & Editing by Allison Cimo.

We recently partnered with Bounty to support emerging artists and designers in a national design competition. The ask? Design a graphic for a new Brit + Co and Bounty paper towel collection themed A Clean Fresh Start, which launches this month. In this creator spotlight series, we are featuring the winners of that competition to learn more about their inspirations, their design process, and their winning Bounty design. Read on to meet…

Sherry Freyermuth | BoBerry Design Co. | @quiltingwithbobodesign | Southeastern Massachusetts

What are your design inspirations? I’ve always loved collage art from artists such as Charles Wilkin and Danielle Krysa. And I love hand-lettering from artists such as Jessica Hische and Gia Graham. I think it was seeing Lynn Giunta’s work — she’s a creative artist — that made me realize I could combine my two interests of collage and lettering.

I’ve focused a lot of my energy this past year on making designs for quilting and sewing products. That’s definitely inspired by my mom, Karen Saunders, and her love of quilting. I’ve been crafting and creating my whole life because of her, and now we collaborate on projects together. It’s been such a fun process to work with her to create products with my own art on them — 10-year-old me would be very happy!

Tell us about your design process. I create cheerful surface designs using a paper-cutting technique. I begin my designs by cutting shapes, letters, and icons out of paper. I love to use rudimentary tools, such as children's scissors and construction paper, to keep my designs loose and playful. This helps give the designs a naïve quality that works well for children’s products. I combine this with the technical process I’ve developed in my 15+ years as a graphic designer to complete the design digitally using Adobe Illustrator. I create these cheerful, modern designs for both kids and the young at heart!

How did you get into illustration? I’ve been a graphic designer for over 15 years and for the past 10 years I’ve been a design educator. I’m currently an assistant professor of studio art at Clark University in Worcester, MA. When I moved from Texas to Massachusetts to take this role in fall 2020, as you can imagine, it was a difficult time to feel creative. I didn’t have any local graphic design clients, but in January 2021, I decided to sign up for a drawing challenge on Instagram to spark my creativity again. This helped me develop a habit, and I was able to fit in a little work each day for a month. As I worked, I realized I wanted to shift from freelance graphic design to focusing on getting my illustration work onto products. Imagine my surprise when I won this contest to design for Bounty in June 2021. It was an absolute dream project!

What are three IG accounts you love? All three of these accounts are female-owned small businesses because that’s really what’s inspiring me these days.

• Puzzles of Color is co-owned by sibling duo Ericka and William and together they make puzzles featuring art by artists of color. The puzzles are beautiful and celebratory. William was actually one of my graphic design students in 2013, and now I’m looking to him for business advice!
• Elizabeth Silver is a wealth of knowledge in the surface design industry. She’s been working as a surface pattern designer for 20 years, and I basically learned all my first surface design business tips from the advice on her youtube channel and blog. She’s also a hilarious writer, and I do read every newsletter she sends my way!
• Elizabeth Chappell is a quilt pattern designer and host of the “Craft to Career” podcast. This podcast has been my road map to figuring out how to develop a business in the craft industry…fun fact, I was featured on a business coaching call episode last August. It really helped me think about narrowing my focus because I tend to want my hands in all the creative things!

How do you know when a piece of art, including your winning Bounty design, is “finished”? This is a tough question because each project is different. Sometimes I work through several ideas before completing a design, and sometimes I work through one concept from start to finish, but I might keep changing it throughout the process.

Here’s one example: I recently designed a Halloween countdown calendar, and I knew from the beginning that I wanted a coffin shape and spooky elements like ghosts, skeletons, and spiders. As I developed it, I found that the concept didn’t change, but I came to a point where it wasn’t looking quite right. I ended up taking out several elements and then it finally felt complete. My designs are often very dense, but I had to rethink it in this case because it didn’t work for the type of product I was trying to create.

Overall, it’s hard to describe, but the “finished” quality of the work is part intuitively knowing that it’s done, and part knowing that done is better than perfect!

Be sure to look out for Sherry’s winning design wherever Bounty Paper Towels are sold!

Gilmore Girls fans can all agree that, despite how much we love the show, Lane Kim (Keiko Agena) deserved WAY better. But Keiko admits that even though Lane's treatment on GG leaves a lot to be desired (starting with the fact that Lane is Korean American and Keiko is Japanese American), it was still a special role.

Keep reading to see which Gilmore Girls costars Keiko Agena talks to the most!

Keiko Agena has a complicated relationship with 'Gilmore Girls' character Lane Kim.

Saeed Adyani/Netflix

“I think what [the role] was for people was different than what it was for me,” she tells Juliet Litman on an episode of the Dear Felicity rewatch podcast (via People). “In a weird way, I feel like I want to honor the experience that people had from the show, and what it meant to them, especially young Asian people, because I get that comment a lot, about what it was like for them to see someone like that on screen.”

And it's no surprise that as much as Gilmore Girls viewers love Lane, Keiko "[loves] her too. I can tell, when I meet someone who knows Gilmore Girls or who loves Lane, it's like, I recognize that love. I see that you love that person."

But it's possible to hold two conflicting emotions at the same time, and although Lane Kim was an incredibly special role at the time, there are some things Keiko would do differently today. “The best thing is to have a Korean American writer [and a] Korean American actor,” she says. “I don't think that that role, cast that way, would happen today. But at that time, in 2000, it was such a different time that I definitely know I wouldn't have said no or pulled myself out of that situation at that time...Now it's just a mix of just having gratitude for having gone through that experience and having that experience.”

Watch Lauren Graham & Scott Patterson's Mini Gilmore Girls Reunion for more Stars Hollow love!