By signcraft
Posted on Monday, December 22nd, 2025
When he sent SignCraft photos of some of his recent projects, James Dobson [Albury, New South Wales, Australia] included a few things that weren’t quite signs but still pretty cool graphics projects. Early in his career, he started doing graphics on envelopes of cards and letters for friends. [See “Knock someone out with an incredible envelope” from the November/December 2017 issue of SignCraft.] While they aren’t signs, they put the principles of sign layout to work. We thought you’d like to see these recent examples.
“They have ceased to be ‘envelopes’,” says James, “and have evolved into what I can only describe as ‘Custom Name Graphics.’ People love receiving them, but none so much as fellow signwriters or similar creatives. I think they realize the value of the hand-drawn designs as opposed to the ocean of digital print we now all swim in.
“Although they’re small hand-drawn designs, they still contain the same design approach I use with most of my stuff and could easily be 20-ft.-high wall murals. The designs seem to form themselves as I draw, and they’ve really helped me improve my layout skills over the years.
“I mainly give them as framed gifts. I had a public showing of them in an art gallery a few years back and the response was really positive. They’re all freehand with zero design constraints. I still get a real buzz out of doing them, and at 65 and semi-retired, this is very important!”
James also sent some of the graphic design work that he has done in Microsoft Word. In his travels around Australia, he didn’t have a computer yet still ran into graphic design work. He would go to the nearest public library and do the layout there. Since they didn’t have graphic design software, he figured out how to do it in Word.
“This business card was done in Word,” he says. “The background pic was grabbed off the ‘net then inserted in a transparent box shape. The text was in a transparent text box which can be manually floated around the format to obtain the best layout placement. It was saved as a PDF then sent to Vista Print.”
James did the wedding invitation, business card and T-shirt design above in Microsoft Word.
