We're just getting the last couple of things for AICon ready at the moment and thought we'd share some of our planning.

One of the first things we needed to sort out were inserts to go in every attendee's bag. We toyed around with the idea of having two different designs (like the left and right halves of a heart), and encourage people to find somebody with a matching half for a reward. We didn't quite have enough time to organise 700 prizes, so we had to abandon that idea (maybe next time). Instead we decided to put do ten special inserts with some gold highlights that could be brought to us and exchanged for a sticker or a sticker's value off any of our other items.

To help make sure that people who don't know about the special inserts hunt around for them, we decided to do five different insert designs (not including the special ones) in the hopes that anybody who discovers that somebody else has a different one will be interested to see how many other designs there might be. After an evening of furious brainstorming, we settled on having four "Happy Fruit" inspired designs (a strawberry, a lemon, an orange and a pear) as well as a separate one featuring pea people and a rainbow. The special insert is Lof Balloon inspired and has a message for whomever is lucky enough to find one.

Just for entertainment value, here's a look at a handful of the insert designs that didn't make it (there are a lot more in the Speed Scribbles comic).

We also decided to get some business cards made up. I was ordering a bunch of rounded corner cards for Mim's lofversary present anyway, so we adapted the design we were using for the jokers to use as personal cards, and made two more generic cards with the two lof bees heart logo. They all feature our new catch phrase thingy that was suggested by a friend of ours: "Bite sizes snacks of arty fun and delicious cuteness." After we'd printed a whole stack of stuff, Mim said that people will probably think we sell cupcakes, but they look great, and I figure that any people who come to us because they like cupcakes will at least have something in common with us.

I suggested we should try to do something for the convention that wouldn't be available through our online shop. Mim thought that putting our designs on keyring tags would be a good idea. Since they're pretty small, we've been able to use some hand drawn artwork and still have them look good (everything else that we have available has been redone as a vector image, and that represents a lot of work).

With everything we've been working on, we've been pretty snowed under. It's been tricky for both of us to balance our non-lofbees committments, but thankfully we've had some little friends help out.

We're looking forward to having a fun weekend and hopefully we'll see some of you there!