Santa Barbara

As part of my Locals Only series, I’ve created a design for yet another beautiful Central Coast City, Santa Barbara California. Santa Barbara is well known for it’s exquisite beaches, timeless Spanish architecture, and the delightful State St.

California’s idea of “vintage” architecture is much newer than the rest of the worlds. But we take vintage where we can get it. And Santa Barbara is abundant with buildings and shops that make you feel as though you’ve stepped back in time.

The design

I’m having fun doing my “locals only” designs for cities/towns in the area, and I thought I’d give Santa Barbara a go. I made an attempt a couple of months ago that was uninspired, but I’m super happy with this. The point when the design really clicked was when I decided to go for a Spanish tile vibe.

Santa Barbara is famous for its Spanish style architecture, from the terra cotta tile roofs, to the white stucco down to the Spanish tile adornments. I studied lots of Spanish tile patterns and shapes to get one that felt simplistic but still evoked that style. The color pallette and font was actually borrowed from a project I did back in 2015 for a friend’s wedding invitations.