by Brooke Forry

Who created the Balance Bound Planner?

In 2019, Brooke Forry and Terry Packard Baker — hi, that’s us! — launched the Balance Bound Planner. What started as an extension of our boutique design firm, Curious & Co. Creative, has now become a full-fledged product line.

We’ve been running Curious & Co. since 2010, creating visual branding for small businesses. We have dabbled in stationery a bit in the past, including launching a super successful limited line of patriotic postcards in 2017 called We the Postcard, with half of all proceeds (about $7,000 total) donated to the ACLU, Americans for the Arts, and the NRDC.

We meticulously designed, refined, and perfected the interior layout of the Balance Bound Planner… and that was just the beginning. Turning it into an American-made product line with two different binding styles, six cover designs, and a whole brand built around it has been a huge undertaking (we’ll be giving you a closer look at the whole process soon!).

For our 2021 collection, we are thrilled to also feature the art of two amazing designers:

Jen Hewett

Jen is a printmaker, surface designer, textile artist and teacher. A lifelong Californian, Jen combines her love of loud prints and saturated colors with the textures and light of the California landscapes to create highly-tactile, visually-layered, printed textiles.

We’ve long admired Jen’s work and are positively thrilled to have her Imaginary Basket pattern as part of our 2021 collection. (Bonus points if you can spot the pattern x2 in the background of her photo!)

Beth Schneider

Beth is a surface pattern designer based in the suburbs of Chicago. After obtaining a degree in Interior Architecture, she returned to school, pivoting to a career in graphic and surface design. Since launching Beth Schneider Designs in 2009, Beth has been designing stationery, fabric, and patterns for licensing.

I met Beth at the National Stationery Show in 2014 via Minted, and I’ve loved following her career ever since. I fell head over heels for her Fresh Blossoms pattern the first time I saw it, and it felt like kismet that the design fit in perfectly with the Balance Bound color palette.