My 40 Bad Puns I Illustrated To Show You ‘How Eye Roll’

LEFD Designs is the creation of Australian-based couple Lisa and Elijah. We are creative digital artists, illustrators, and authors. All of our artwork revolves around puns! LEFD Designs came to life in 2020 during the great Covid lockdown. Being forced to stay at home (which we loved as introverts) gave us plenty of time to get creative. We both enjoyed drawing in our spare time and had recently moved from traditional art to digital art. We had our iPad and Apple Pencil and completely taught ourselves how to draw digitally. Drawing together every day then led to the creation of LEFD Designs, which is an acronym of our names (and we’re both left-handed). As you can see, we’ve always loved word play, so our artwork focus naturally found its way to puns.

With our artistic styles, we definitely bounce off each other. We both found that we love drawing cartoons, using simple colorful characters. Being a couple and going through the learning process together, we adapted and combined both of our art styles as one. Cute and colorful has always been our go-to.

We began drawing and never stopped! We decided to put our creative juices together and illustrated and published our very first book series which included “Purrfectly Sweet Puns for Tweethearts” and “The Smart Ass Book of Puns”, which are available to purchase on Amazon. We also opened online shops on Etsy, Teepublic and Redbubble to sell our artwork. I (Lisa) then created an Instagram account to share my artwork. I followed some art accounts with weekly drawing prompts from talented artists such as @andy_stonehouse_illustrator and @mattdrawsstuffuk. Having a weekly theme such as ‘Vampire’ gave me the inspiration to draw a cute cat in a vampire costume called ‘Vampurr’. This has been my art inspiration ever since, running with a theme then brainstorming how to represent that best as a pun. I have found this to be the perfect way to keep drawing and sharing our love of puns. Our favorite concepts are the ones that are a bit cheeky and make people smile, cringe or both!

As we are both primary school teachers, being aware of a target audience and remaining appropriate is always our focus - in fact, this career path has been a great practise field for our cringe-worthy puns. We're not sure if it's an entirely conscious action but we are always using puns in our conversations. Basically, we have evolved into walking, talking dad jokes and we're not sure if that's a good thing or not!

We try to cater to a diverse audience with different senses of humor by drawing a mixture of themes. Whether it’s animals, food, movies or video game characters, as long as it’s punny, it goes! Whether it’s a cheeky ghost (boo-ty) or a sweet donut couple (donut ever let me go), if it makes someone smile then our mission is accomplished. We find puns are a form of positivity, so we strive to use our cringe-worthy imagination and dad-joke sense of humor to brighten someone’s day, even if only for just a split second; this is why we use simple yet bright illustrations with vivid colors to invoke that positive response. They say laughter is the best medicine - so whether you're laughing at us or with us (even if it's a cringe laugh), our goal is complete!