Artist Feature: I Love Cats by Hey Cute Design

I Love Cats is a NEW and purr-fectly delightful design collection by Hey Cute Design for Summer of 2024. We asked Diane, the artist behind Hey Cute Design to share some of the inspiration and design process of this delightful collection with us so we could share it with you.

Here is some of what she had to share about the process of designing the I Love Cats Design Collection.

How Do You Plan For A New Design Collection?

“I wish I could be strategic and scheduled with the creation of my design collections – but I’m not! Ideas come when they come and I don’t force them. This makes it so I’m not always designing collections at the right timing for each season. But it does keep the collections authentic and when an idea comes that I get excited about, then I work on it.”

What Was the Design Process for the I Love Cats Collection?

One day I just started thinking about very simple cat face drawings – and so I worked on designing a simple enough drawing that allowed me to create a variety of looks based on one shape. In my design work I do a lot with vectors in Adobe Illustrator – here’s a screen capture of my process in drawing the cat shape.

I loved how the simple cats came together so I decided to create patterns of cats from this.

I started with a grid layout, a tossed layout, and what I called a tipped layout.

Grid Cats

Tossed Cats

Tipped Cats

I choose to use the grid and tipped layouts for collection.

If I want to create a full collection, the next step for me is to think of coordinating patterns I might want to use if I were to make a quilt or a dress with these designs. The colors in this collection are very simple – so I choose to create coordinates in the orange, black, and grays.

I love ticking stripe so I did this in two colors – black and orange.

Ticking Black

Ticking Orange

I usually like to incorporate a dot coordinate into collections but with the cat theme I thought using cat paws in place of dots would be “paw-fect”. So I made coordinates in two colors with that.

Lastly, I decided to use the original cat drawings in various ways with a checkerboard pattern, some siamese cats, and black cats on orange – which may be fun for Halloween.

Checkerboard Cats

Siamese Cats

Black Cats on Orange

So that’s the process of how I designed this simple collection. Every project I create takes on a life of its own and some are definitely more complex than others. All along this design collection felt like its value was in simplicity and I’m excited to see what you make with it!

Diane is the artist behind Hey Cute Design. She is a granny of 18, a doctor of education, and a digital designer. She finds her inspiration from primitive and folk art and draws in a style that is happy and uplifting. Her goal is to produce smiley art that “pops” from across the room.

You can view her full artist profile and design collections here on our website. You can also visit her own website at heycutedesign.com.