Karen Strunks Professional Birmingham-based Freelance Photographer

A big thank you to Supercool Design

As some of you may have read in this post, my Dad passed away last month.

One of my Dad’s old school friends wrote  some words for the priest to read at out the funeral. He told the story of when my Dad was taking one of his English exams. At the end of the exam paper my Dad wrote. “PS The Rest Is Silence”. This is a quote from Hamlet.

O, I die, Horatio;

The potent poison quite o’er-crows my spirit;

I cannot live to hear the news from England,

But I do prophesy the election lights

On Fortinbras: he has my dying voice;

So tell him, with the occurrents, more and less,

Which have solicited. The rest is silence.

This story and those words have stayed with me and I had the idea of typing them out and putting them in a frame. I particularly wanted the font to be in a Shakespearean style.  Although I thought I knew what I wanted, I couldn’t really get it any further than the idea stage as much as I pondered upon it.

I got in touch, via twitter, with my friend Katie Parry from Supercool Design in Birmingham. She asked me to drop her an email and I gave her my vague idea. Soon after, this beautiful design arrived by email!

By Katie at Supercool Design, Birmingham

I must admit to shedding a tear or two when I saw it. It was PERFECT. Just how I imagined it, but couldn’t quite put into words. From the font, to the background colour, the vignetting and the important words ‘The rest is silence’, it was exactly what I had hoped for.

Thank you Katie for your instinctive, wonderful design skills, and for this beautiful memento that means so much to me now and will mean so much in years to come.