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Heh, it didn’t take long for me to lose track of this again.

An update on the shirt design: after consulting with my roommates and my typography professor, I made some updates.

The vote went down at Sunday night’s rehearsal, but I had to leave early and missed hearing the results; guess I’ll find out this weekend. At least I still get a free shirt, and the officers really liked the design, but the other illustration submitted (of Brahms receiving an honorary Ph.D from Carnegie Mellon) was really cute, too.

So what am I working on right now? Several things.

Seminar: Wrapping up the design brief Marcus, Lauren, and I are working on the nuclear waste brief (not actually proposing strategies to deal with it, but outlining everything designers have to take into account).
Studio: Storyboarding for our motion project on reading. Thanks to an inspired idea by my friend Claire, I’m focusing on the idea of illiteracy when somebody goes abroad, and doing some kind of short first-person narrative–not set specifically in Japan and not rooted in my experiences, but just of the general experiences one has with going abroad, interspersed with facts about reading from an international perspective.
Typography: Continuing work on laying out a New Yorker article on Matthew Carter. (InDesign crashing after I’d designed half of it and making me lose my work has set me back somewhat.)
Letterpress: Still nailing down the specs of the work I’ll be doing. Since I’m doing this as a course, I need to come up with a cohesive, graduate-level project that the instructor can evaluate me on; I’d had my sights on doing a simple book of meaningful quotes and passages, but it’s been pointed out that it’d be good if there were a cohesive theme tying them all together, so I have to go reevaluate.

And starting next week: Presentation and Pitch Design, a mini taught by Carlos, a second-year design grad student, which will fit snugly into the two-hour block between my Monday and Wednesday seminar and studio courses. This means that I’ll be in class from 10AM-4:30PM straight. Great! (At least it’ll be useful.)

I’ve also started searching for winter boots. I haven’t worn boots of any sort in 20 years, so this is kind of a weird thing for me overall, but I’m already wearing the warmest coat I own and it’s only October, so…yeah. Winter coats are on the agenda, too. Like, serious ones, not the ones you get in Atlanta that are only good for the weather hitting the freezing point. (And I’ve been keeping an eye out for long underwear, too.)

And speaking of orchestra, as the image indicates, we have a concert in just under three weeks. I have a lot of practicing to do before then that I’m wishing I’d done before now. We also started sightreading new music in String Theory (the chamber orchestra group) for our February concert: Beethoven’s 7th Symphony and Mozart’s 40th Symphony! I’m particularly psyched about the former. Even if I don’t have time for orchestra in the spring, I hope we work it out so I can stay with String Theory (they’d prefer that people be in both, since ST’s an offshoot of the orchestra).

Time to get back to work, but I swear images of the work I’ve done will be up here eventually. (Perhaps not super-detailed, though, as some of them are a little more personal than I like to get online. But we’ll see how it goes.)

I threw this together for the All University Orchestra shirt tonight, instead of doing my seminar readings. (Heh.)

I’m not totally certain this is the final design; it’s still rough around the edges, and I may think of something better, but I like the concept. I designed it at 8″x8″ with the intention of having it be on the back of the shirt, but can easily resize it (probably to make it bigger?). Unfortunately, we aren’t actually allowed to use “Carnegie Mellon University,” “CMU,” or any other similar variant anywhere on the shirt, so it has to stay kind of vague.

It hit me that every single design I’ve done for school so far this term has been in black-and-white. Not really sure why that is…I’d love to work some more color in somehow but it just hasn’t worked out that way.

Wow. Man. Hi. Is anyone still out there?

I’ve been around, but gave up on the public blogging thing for a while…now that I’ve begun a new phase of my life, though, it seems as good a time as any to get back into it. I was considering other blogging platforms for a while (Posterous, Tumblr), but I have this web space and am not doing that much with it right now, so why not?

As of the beginning of August, I’m no longer a resident of Atlanta: I’m living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, having begun grad school at Carnegie Mellon University (I still get a thrill every time I hear that name). I’m in the School of Design, studying Communication Planning and Information Design. I’m very interested in the meeting point of design and technology, especially on the web, and in online communication and communities, as well as cross-cultural communication issues.

I’m sharing a gorgeous, if surprisingly cold, house with three very awesome girls from my program (and a very unobtrusive mouse, for a little while). Really, my whole program has been pretty cool, and the school has a lot to offer. The city of Pittsburgh is great, too–it’s this hidden gem of a town, and I think the G-20′s brought it a lot of exposure, and we’ll be seeing more great things here in the future. My only concern, after growing up in the south, is how to handle the approaching winter.

One of the things I would like to do is keep some kind of public record of all the work I’m doing as part of this program, as well as in general.

This semester I’m taking two core courses, our Design Seminar and Design Studio, and a Graduate Typography elective.

Just last week, I had a switch-up with some of my classes; I dropped my Social Web class (a Human-Computer Interaction course), as it ended up being very heavy on the statistical analysis side and didn’t do much with the behavioral/observation side (e.g., we read a lot of studies and stats about online usage, but didn’t really do much direct observation/participation). In its place, I’m in the process of setting up a letterpress and bookbinding independent study, and I’ll be starting a half-semester-long course in a couple of weeks on presentation and pitch design (both pitching design and designing pitches). I hope to do a Social Web independent study in the future, to continue to study the subject matter but focusing more on my area of interest.

That’s where it all stands now. I’m currently working on a few things:

• a group paper with Marcus and Lauren, drafting a design brief for designers who are creating a communication system warning future generations about nuclear waste repositories 10,000 years in the future
• beginning an exploration into some aspect of reading and books in the future (which will be a motion project), most likely focusing on multiple languages and the idea of il/literacy when you go abroad
• a semi-experimental typography treatment for an essay on type designer Matthew Carter
• on the extracurricular side, a t-shirt design for CMU’s All University Orchestra

And so far I’ve worked on:

• a self-portrait in information design, focusing on type-as-image and recreating a few bars of Dvorak’s “Largo” movement from his New World Symphony almost completely in text/type
• a process book for the above project
• some exploratory work (not actual assignments) in calendar design, “I used to __ but now I don’t” typography self-portraits
• studying Wikipedia user dynamics and the social process of editing articles
• lots and lots of rather philosophical reading, making us approach the idea of design and design thinking from a very different foundation–it goes way, way beyond just graphics; it’s really a full-on world view

I think that’s everything for now…there will definitely be more to come.

Brand New recently covered the newly redesigned logo for the Sendai Astronomical Observatory in Sendai, the capitol of Miyagi Prefecture and one of the major cities of northeastern, Japan. It’s rare that a brand campaign makes me sit up in my seat and blurt, “Gorgeous!” but this one did, in its simplicity and the brilliance of its execution, in how gracefully it handled the bilingual depiction of the name (nice, sleek typeface for the kanji, too!), and in drawing out “hidden” astronomical imagery from everyday items. The rendition of a gas giant and its rings in the curve of a cup and saucer is deliciously wonderful.

Lately I’ve been getting pretty sick of this influx of social networking apps–not their existence, but their names.

Flickr. Tumblr. Pownce. Reddit. Utterz.

Give me a freaking break. So now it’s the “in thing” to create an app and give it a name that omits or twists a letter around in a preexisting word? Thanks to Flickr, I can no longer type or read “flicker” without it looking strange. I’m sure that wasn’t what they set out to do, but now everyone is doing something similar and it’s crossed that line from being cute to being ludicrous.

And it’s cool that these apps have all been created out of a movement to connect people online further and to facilitate the faster retrieval of information, but after reading Jeffrey Zeldman’s article on the death of the personal website, I can’t get it out of my head when I think about all this stuff. I remember the days when I–when everyone I knew–would put everything up manually. Photos, current music faves, books we’d read recently, favorite bookmarks. But now there’s Flickr, last.fm, AllConsuming, and del.icio.us, and dozens of sites just like them. People embed these apps and applets into their personal sites–which have typically evolved into blogs–and so their sites have become a lot more effortless, and in some ways, a lot less personal.

I do have a Flickr account. It became a necessity in terms of uploading the 3200-plus photos I took during my two years in Japan–there was just no way I had the time to thumbnail them and manually code and update my website to host them. I will admit that I hesitated in signing up for Flickr, though, in the hopes that I could indeed do it myself. But with the exception of creating a del.icio.us account a while back and updating it maybe twice, I haven’t touched it. I also have an active account on Facebook, but that’s a little different from these labor-saving sorts of sites.

I’m the type of person who digs my heels in when some new, flashy item or fad comes along. IPhones? Pfft. mp3 players? Why, when CDs work so well? (I did give in and I own a Creative Zen 30GB media player…but I will never give up on CDs. The mp3 format is, by definition, quite lossy and compressed, and I can’t stand listening to a symphony or quartet or violin concerto when it’s all muffled due to minimizing the file size. I lament that stereo systems have become obsolete, and that I now have to shell out money for a home theater system to get the best possible sound when I don’t even own a TV!)

In terms of these “new-fangled” apps, I’m definitely digging my heels in. I know SXSW Interactive this year revolved around Twitter in terms of meeting up with folks, and since I left straight for Osaka from Austin, I couldn’t bring my laptop with me and missed out entirely on that aspect of the conference…and if I go again next year, I might sign up just to take advantage of that way to network…but only for that.

And whatever new websites I develop, I definitely won’t be giving any of them cutesy names.

I’m on a mission to find The Perfect Messenger Bag. I’ve never been a purse girl–I bought a black one at Target I use every so often, but it just doesn’t hold enough to make me happy. I also don’t use leather products.

I’ve been eyeing this one for a while…

It’s the Kyoto Messenger Bag at ShanaLogic, which is perfect. Chocolate brown is my current color addiction, and anyone who knows me knows that I love sakura motifs like this and favor simplicity in many aspects of my life, including visual aesthetics. However, I only just realized that the sakura isn’t screenprinted but stitched on, and I don’t want the flowers to tear off over the months/years this bag gets slung around.

While searching around, though (which is challenging, because searching for “sakura” brings up hits for several anime characters, and “cherry blossom” brings up all sorts of stuff, including lingerie on Amazon), I found something completely unrelated but totally fantastic:

In their spring 2008 Large Patterns collection, Noni Designs features this oven mitt design. How adorable is that? I know I’m totally contradicting my statement about preferring simple things, but to quote Nathan Lane’s character in The Birdcage, “One does want a touch of color.” You really can’t say no to a splash of bright cheer like this. But if only I knew how to knit…

I’m also wondering if I should just get a standard brown canvas bag and paint a sakura motif on it myself. My coworker has been extolling the virtues of Timbuk2, and for a bag that’s supposed to last for years, the price is pretty reasonable. I just wonder if I’ll screw up on my paint job and end up defacing it for life, even though I know myself well enough to know I will have very carefully planned the design out, crafted it to scale, chosen the paint colors and type carefully, and charted it all out step by agonizing step…only to lose my grip on the brush and have it slip and dash a garish streak of pink across the face of the bag. I’m not particularly spontaneous, nor do I tend to decorate my own things that often, preferring to buy things with well-made designs that I already like.

Anyway, the search is on! Hopefully I can find something that hits the spot.

Post-It Sheer Color notes are such an excellent idea. Instead of the notes obscuring the page, you can add an extra layer of personalized notes without vandalizing the book underneath! I think I’ll be buying these in bulk when I go back to grad school next year.

(Via Design Crush, one of my daily reads.)