#ourtales

OURTALES — brand character system

Year — 2020 Client — Our Tales Category — Illustration / Branding Medium — Character Design System Tools — Adobe Illustrator

Description — Illustration project developed for Our Tales, an Australian platform that showcases local micro-entrepreneurs and community-based businesses.

The work consisted of creating a set of brand characters to represent different business categories within the platform. Each character was designed in a doodle-style illustration and paired with a companion creature or mascot to reinforce its identity.

The system includes characters representing food & bakery, experiences (music & photography), design & decoration, and beauty & health, creating a cohesive and playful visual language for the brand.

Credits — Motion & Animation — Cristian Sanchez

Halloween or All Hallows Eve is the time dedicated to remembering the Dead including saints (hallows in Old English) Martyrs and all the other faithful departed. The festival is typically linked to the Celtic festival of Samhain, which comes from the Old Irish for "summer's end" and puts it neatly in the modern calendar at the end of October.

Samhain marked the end of the harvest season and start of winter or the 'darker half' of the year. It was seen as a time when the boundary between this world and the “other world” thinned and the Sprits or Faeries could more easily come in to our world. So once we’ve spent the night celebrating the saints and martyrs we move on to Guy Fawkes and bonfires and gunpowder plots and more. It’s a tenuous link but all this talk of death and ghosts set me thinking.

Husband and I are now a Normal dysfunctional family in England. We are on our second marriage with children that are His or Hers but not Theirs. I’d like him to have anything I’ve saved up or we’ve built together but if I die too soon I don’t want the Potential New Wife to get her hands on it. I want it to be shared between our children instead. I’d have to come back and haunt them if I hadn’t written a will and can you imagine the chaos that could cause. Almost tempting…………………. But no I would rather know that the children will benefit. 

November is Will Aid month.  This is a partnership between solicitors and charities where every November, participating solicitors waive their fee for writing a basic will. Instead they ask clients to make a donation to Will Aid which in turn supports charities such as the British Red Cross.

Research has revealed that 73% of 16-54 year olds don’t have a Will and it is something on an awful lot of To Do lists around the country. If you don’t leave a will the law decides how your Estate (your possessions, money, property, house etc.) is passed on and this may not necessarily be how you want it.

For us it was a very simple process. It probably took about an hour meeting outlining what we wanted and then a second meeting going over things to make sure they were correct and then we signed our lives away. I now know that should something happen to me then Potential New Wife won’t be spending my hard earned savings on new Jimmy Choos.

If I died without a will then what I want doesn’t really matter, there are rules that are followed and that’s just my tough luck. Contrary to popular belief it is also not a complicated or particularly expensive thing to do. Obviously if you have a very complicated family set up or more specialist needs then that will cost more, but for a basic will it can be very reasonable.

There is often one thing that keeps you awake at night, one thing that you want in life and one thing that you want to be sure of. This one thing is so important to you that it is the thing that determines whether peace of mind, financial security and financial independence is achievable.

I’m assuming that you would call yourself financially independent. If I was to tell you that to have total financial security and complete peace of mind all you have to do is sell everything and take yourself off to Outer Mongolia. You would think I am completely barking mad. But it’s true, you wouldn’t ever have to worry about money again. You’d be the richest person in the village, yes you might have to walk a bit to get food and water for the rest of your life but you would have peace of mind knowing that you’d never run out of money.

But hold on, let’s just be realistic for a moment here. You’d have to want to live a very simple life with very little luxury for all of the above to be achievable. What about the nice car, going out for meals if you don’t fancy cooking, holidays with the family, big birthday celebrations, the shopping sprees, even the smaller luxuries in life. All of a sudden living a simple life in a shack in Outer Mongolia doesn’t sound quite so appealing.

Lifestyle. That’s what it all it comes down to when you think about it. Other than good health, the thing that anyone really craves is to have the lifestyle they desire. That is why you work so hard. To enjoy the lifestyle you create. It is what you want to maintain and improve throughout your lifetime.

What we at Brown Dog Financial Planning do is focus on the lifestyle that you want. Whether you want to retire early buy a boat and sail round the world for the rest of your years, maintain your current situation or to be able to give to important causes in your life. Everyone’s lifestyle is different and that’s why we love what we do.

I had a lovely ride on my fortunately very sensible horse across some newly cut stubble fields at the weekend. As I was eyeing up some of the straw bales and wondering if I should regress to my teenage years and jump them or not, I did have in the back of my mind that I ought to be sensible.  Now I’m (cough) years old and self employed I really couldn’t chance falling off.

It was a really odd feeling and put a bit of a damper on my youthful exuberance and set me thinking.  How would we cope financially at home if one of us wasn’t earning.  Both myself and Husband are self employed and an injury or more permanent accident or illness would have quite a devastating impact on us and our family.  Luckily our children are adults now, but they do live at home and the Bank of Mum and Dad still does a roaring trade.

Ironically it is often the accident or serious illness that has the most impact on our lives.  We are all quite good at having life insurance to cover the mortgage or we get provided with Life Cover through work, but Illness cover is overlooked.

Our future plans rely on our ability to keep earning at the same or hopefully a better level for the next 10/20/30 years.  It means we can pay off the mortgage, save for holidays, even pay into the pension and ISAs.  If that changes, life suddenly gets really tough. 

If there was cash point in your house that gave you £100 every morning you would insure it against breaking down and that money stream stopping.  It’s the same principle.

I know I keep banging on about it, but good solid planning of any sort, financial and otherwise is truly key.  There is Plan A where everything goes along swimmingly well.  That’s the one we all want, but we all know reality has a nasty habit of pulling the rug out from under us, so Plan B is probably the more important one.

In your 30's and 40's? Got young children at home? Is that "To do" list never ending? We get that sorting out your finances might not be top of your priority list right now. The thought of Wills, Life Insurance, ISA's and Pensions are enough to send anyone to sleep. Having to find the time in the day to go through all the jargon and technical details, trying to find the best deal, whilst juggling a million and one other things, is quite frankly not going to happen.

Did you know that we're more likely to insure our pets then ourselves? Should you get hit by a bus, no matter how much you love your furry friends, they wont be able to pay the mortgage.

You may find you have cover with your employer, but is it enough? If only one of you is working and you survive with injuries, you might find yourself up a creek with no paddle at the worst possible time.

Could you continue your family's lifestyle without yours or your partner's salary? If the answer is no and you don't have cover in place, then pop in for a coffee and a chat and we can guide you through it. No Jargon, no complication.