It’s not Hallowe’en already, is it?

Running a design business means thinking ahead. In this case, it’s over two months ahead, with two witchy designs for the Hallowe’en market.

Hallowe’en imagery

What makes a Hallowe’en design? The list for the modern designer includes pumpkins, witches, skulls, skeletons, bats, graveyards.. and many more. I decided to go with a witch, since a witch flying on a broomstick is a good image not only for Hallowe’en, but for any time of the year.

Bats, the moon and a graveyard feature in the images above. Links for the shop below.

A witch!

For the two designs discussed here, I used the same ‘witch’ outline. I traced this in Inkscape, keeping it minimal except for the hair. I changed the hair to green in the design that mentions Hallowe’en, red was fine for the more general witch design.

Final designs

The two legends for the design are based on old tropes.

‘Have gun, will travel’ originated in classified ads, as an advert for a man who was looking for gun-for-hire work. It meant that you had tools and would travel to work, being used as the title for a Western TV series in the late 1950s. This was adapted as ‘Have Tux, Will Travel’ for Bob Hope’s autobiography¹. From this, the meme/ trope process changed it to whatever application was needed until it became a snowclone.

‘The Mountains are calling, and I must go’ in another snowclone that I’ve used before for a Murder, She Wrote design.

I used Canva for the final design. Fonts fall under the ‘spooky’ category; Beast is the scratchy font in the “Have Broomstick” design, Beaver Punch, with some manipulation using the TypeCraft app for the “Have Broomstick. I also added some watercolour splashes behind the witch in both design to fill them out a little.

Scottish tradition

I grew up in the north of Scotland, to English parents. The tradition in Scotland is for ‘guising’, where you dress up in a costume and visit the houses of people you know. Once there, you do a wee performance (poem², joke, dance – whatever) in exchange for sweeties. This is subtly different from ‘trick or treat’, because you feel that you earned the sweets.

To my mind trick or treat is a bit menacing. As Eddie Izzard put it in Definite Article³:

Trick or treat! Give us stuff for no reason!

By the time we moved to England in 1982, I was a bit too old for guising, and anyway nobody knew what that was. Trick or treat was imported some time in the late 80s, though this passed me by. Mrs S had no tradition of demanding sweets from neighbours, but then she grew up in central London.

1. Also Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, a 1958 Robert A Heinlein novel. ↩︎
2. One year, our dad made me and my sister owl and cat costumes and we recited The Owl and the Pussycat for everyone who didn’t stay still long enough. ↩︎
3. One of my favourite stand-up shows. ↩︎