Thursday, July 5th, 2007
In Design Fundamentals
Back from the break and a busy day in class today. The first critique went well and everyone had good feedback and helpful questions.
Lots of similar answers were up on the board, but some definitely worked better than others. Subtle changes ended seeming much larger from far away, an issue I haven’t dealt with for the better part of a year.
We continued on our journey through basic typographic hierarchy and began exercises utilizing two variables instead of one – leaving a lot more room for exploration and clarification.
In Software Boot Camp
The afternoon was spent working with quotes from Pulp Fiction. It’s amazing to see how everyone interprets things differently. I had forgotten how much fun school can be when everyone has good input and good work that shows genuine thought and problem solving.
I’m fairly happy with my revised layout. Though I think the original layout is much busier than most of my work which intrigues me.
Posted in CMU, Design, Summer, Typography | 5 Comments »
Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007
Worked on a new project today, the typographic hierarchy project, which CMU students have been doing for a while now.
It’s interesting going back to the basics of working with typography and being really constrained with what variables you can play with. It is simultaneously constraining and liberating. We’ll be adding variables throughout the rest of the week, so it will be interesting to see where we are in the end.
Everyone else seems to be having similar thoughts about the summer courses so far, even despite our varied backgrounds and design skill levels.
At the end of our six week session we will be creating a process portfolio to document everything we did. It seems like many of these are going to be websites, so I think I’m going to start exploring what I can do. This is a linear progression in lots of ways, though, so a book or some similar exploration might be better.
Posted in CMU, Summer | 1 Comment »
Monday, July 2nd, 2007
First day of Design Fundamentals class today, met a lot of cool people.
Great to see how diverse everyone’s backgrounds are and to finally put faces with names/email addresses.
A few of us met up this evening at Doc’s for beer and lively discussion – hopefully the first of many such outings. I’m excited about the program based mainly on who I’ll get to be around.
Got to organize some tools today as well, a good exercise in what designers actually do:
- Make Decisions
- Categorize
- Organize
I’ve also included my first project at CMU: using type to display song lyrics. Could be better, but I think I got some ideas across in the small amount of time we had to complete the project. Worked on connecting the lyrics to what I was dealing with at the time and exposing what Ben Folds was thinking when throughout the song, since we didn’t have a whole of direction as far as interpreting things. Also some references to starting again as a designer, hoping to get back to where design really comes from and what its power is.
View the Army PDF.
Posted in CMU, Living, Pittsburgh, Summer | No Comments »
Thursday, May 31st, 2007
Well, I’m a designer. Lately I’ve been doing lots of designs that end up as something on the web. Before that I designed things that ended up on the web, on someone’s desk, in a tradeshow booth, on my wall, and other places.
I’m about to begin Carnegie Mellon’s Interaction Design graduate program. That means I’m moving to Pittsburgh, PA and for the first time will be living outside of Kentucky. I’ve visited other places, crossed an ocean or two, but I’ve never been away from Kentucky for more than a month.
I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to see what happens next.
Posted in CMU, Meta | 2 Comments »