Wednesday, December 12th, 2007
Tomorrow marks the end of my first semester of grad school.
One more project to finish. It’s been a lot of work (this week especially), but has been a great time. There will be a revamp of this site to include all of the work that I’ve done. At this point I’d consider this blog a failed experiment. Despite the best of intentions, time must be devoted to more pressing matters.
Now back to the virtual grad student.
Sunday, November 4th, 2007
Obviously school has kept me as busy (or busier) than I expected.
Interesting though is this article that I found: on Basement.org via a feed I read regularly. I’m posting it here (and not as a collected artifact) because it provides a nice bridge between my first project in Grad Studio: a self-portrait poster which is now up on Flickr, and the 2nd project What Is a Book? which I am finishing in the next day or so.
As a society we just keep interpreting data and turning it information. With so much stuff available is everything becoming so overwhelming and watered-down that eventually humanity will no longer be able to process or cope with what has been created? So I put this link here because I found it important enough to make it not just part of a list. Because lists often don’t tell you anything interesting even if they are useful.
We now return to the regularly scheduled silence.
Wednesday, August 29th, 2007
I’m eternally grateful for the friends that I have. Over the past week people have bent schedules, excused my absence, been understanding, and offered hope in panicked moments. All because they knew I was trying my hardest to accomplish everything I’d taken on.
Thanks everybody – new friends and old. I’m sure I don’t say that often enough. It’s amazing what happens when you ask those around you for help. It’s something that I have always avoided, but it’s something I’m having to do more and more now that I’m back in school.
And school got exciting today, really exciting for me. Not quite sure why yet, but there are some ideas forming and old habits breaking. Amazing what sitting around and talking about design can do to enhance creativity.
Monday, July 9th, 2007
Today was our last day with Karen Moyer who was a great teacher. We covered our final exercises and discussed the benefits of different formats and some general rules on establishing page margins. The morning ended with a brief discussion on legibility, line length, kerning, and how leading affects legibility.
We also began descending into the depths of Photoshop today. We begin working with photography tomorrow (or at least learning about photography).
Some of us went to see Sicko tonight. Everyone should see this movie. If nothing else, it might change who you vote for in 2008. The United States must change how it handles healthcare and that change must come from the bottom up.
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:
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.
Thursday, June 28th, 2007
So this past week I moved into the new apartment. Gretchen and I now live in Pittsburgh.