connect closure

2008 is coming to an end... this word has done me good.

it's weird. i have never before had one word seemingly start to apply to everything. i admit, part of it is probably just the simple fact that once you notice something new, you start seeing it everywhere. or once you learn a new word suddenly everyone seems to be using it. and i agree that a lot of what connect came to represent this past year was probably my own construct; but i like to think that it was more than just coincidences. that word had inherent meaning and power. and it challenged me to start to tie it all together. which has not been an easy task...

and now? i know i'm ready for something new. (and i guess that's the point of starting over every twelve months.) but, for melodrama's sake, how will i ever find another word to take it's place? connect left some big shoes to fill.

so the search begins for another word that, ideally i just stumble upon, find to fit surprisingly really well, and run with.

gingerbread house skills

this thing of beauty was a ben & becky team effort. if you take a picture from this angle, you avoid seeing that the entire right wall had collapsed. (the remnants are half eaten on the plate in the background.) still, not bad, right? we should do crafty bonding things like this more often...

cool color things

i came across these beautiful paper sculptures by jen stark the other day (by way of the good blog, i think.) i think it's the coolest thing. and something i have never ever seen before. 1. upon further investigation, she went to mica. 2. her bold use of simple color reminded me of my artist books final. (apparently graphic designers are supposed to be afraid of color. grey, black, and the occasional red get really boring though, if you ask me.) i don't know. i sometimes feel silly and unsophisticated, but there's something about a color spectrum for me, and using it at it's most basic, purest form. it made sense for my somewhat indexical mini-books. and i love how jen stark's straight up construction paper hues are transformed into such high art.

ps. let me know if you want a subscription to good for the upcoming year... i can get two friends in on the action for free!

hopkins holiday cards cont.

ok. last one...

hopkins holiday cards cont.

hopkins holiday cards

a side project in gd1 was submitting designs for the johns hopkins institute for policy studies holiday card. one design was actually selected to send around the world this holiday season. (the winner was rafael soldi. and while you are at his website, check out his other stuff. it's pretty much amazing.)

here's one of my submissions. i'll post the rest in the days to come...

urbanism

as i'm studying for my urbanism final tomorrow night, i wanted to share this ah-ha moment from our last class. besides the bubbles and circles being beautiful, its so interesting to see the united states through this new lens. it makes sense, a perfect product of post modernity. there is little logic to the old hierarchies of urban and rural anymore. everything is much more regional now. according to our teacher, it's just up to policy and government to catch on to it all. (more public transportation please!)

our latest reading, robert fishman's "megaopolis," introduced the idea of the "city a la carte." it's so accurate. (and all about connecting dots...) the idea is that everyone has a different "city" made of different nodes of experience. the control is in the individual, but that makes it even more impossible to control or categorize from outside. (but let's face it, our city planners and government have never had control...) we basically bounce around between a household bubble, consumption bubble, and a production bubble. to me, this freedom sounds refreshing. (aside from the fact that the typical structure of the city a la carte is the world of shopping malls we have created for ourselves.) when ancb started, it was all about breaking down the walls between homogeneous neighborhoods. looking at it now, baltimore should be more about the individual neighborhoods that each resident makes for themselves. the possibilities with that approach are much greater. think about molding a baltimore second grader's city into one that includes, say, the baltimore museum of art and excludes the drug dealers on the corner.

exhibit b:

brown center late at night. someone's final for a lighting class in the environmental design department?

exhibit a:

working on my package design final for graphic design 1.

it has been for a while

i walked into the hallway this morning and these words were dominating the bulletin board. i loved how they totally activated a space that is usually monotonous and always empty handed. i had to stop and go back to my room and grab my camera. i found out later that cathy was the culprit. i don't know if it was an assignment, or something she just did to simply do. she has such a way with words...

tongue in cheek

just might be the best way to acknowledge being a graphic designer in today's economy. (something from because studio.)

let it snow, let it snow.

because it's important every once in a while to make something just for yourself, solely for fun. i wanted indoor snowflakes to compensate for the real stuff i'm missing in michigan. (i made them with old mica letterhead.)

can you tell that my dream side job would be making window displays for anthropologie?

a night of fun and games

another one of those "only at mica" gems of an activity. end scene.

(thought i'd note my inspiration for the circle stickers. the taco bell hot sauce packets. give me no credit for the rhymes, though. that's all google.)

almost done...

aids awareness week 2008 comes to a close tonight with "safely scandalous." should be a fun conclusion to a week of festivities that were much more intensive that i could have imagined...

cap journal

after that last post, i thought i'd share some pages from my cap journal. (my community arts partnership internship this semester is at eutaw marshburn elementary.) you'll probably have to zoom in to actually read it, but there have been some interesting eye openers along the way.

robots!

we made robots today in ms. winfield's fourth grade class. what else would you do with an insanely large supply of metallic paper and tape in the cap storeroom? it was pretty fun.

"only children really see. and so wise adults spend the rest of their lives, from the onset of the blindness, until they die, trying ot see again. and the unwise accept the darkness as light."
-from t.p. luce's "propers" in "tha bloc."

on (enter word here)

i'm feeling good about this one. i finally settled on an idea for my book arts final. and it feels like a good next step. initially i thought i'd do some sort of "desk set" of books. my mid term was a 3 inch binder of found color paper squares, and i was on the verge of doing some out of control indexing. all the elements were ready. i saw a cheap faux-wood plywood desk at the thrift store for $9.90 that i thought i could display them on. i figured i'd finish my rolodex visual dictionary that i started last year. and i wanted to explore doing a perfect bound stack of paper to fit into one of those "page a day" desk calendar holders.

but something wasn't feeling right. the pieces didn't seem motivated. and i put off working on anything for a good two weeks.

after a rejuvinating thanksgiving break, and a huge shopping spree at arnies in houghton lake, i finally came to an idea that i could move forward with. it builds off of a lot of what i've been scratching at with my books so far. one of the books i made (for post binding) was a "slices of life" collection of sketchbook pages and notes and other random ephemera. the thought there was that all of these ah-ha moments sometimes get lost in journals and notebooks, never to be seen again. but if you were to start tearing pages out and compiling them all in one place, you would see common threads that keep coming up. so i went back to this book and pulled words out that kept reappearing. i ended up with at least 30 post-it notes cluttering my desk with them written on it. i then narrowed it down to nine. (for no particular reason.)

now for the key component: i'm going to organize other people's notes and thoughts about those words into individual books. (an "on" series. "on ideas, on lessons, on growth, etc.) the biggest part of that all? doing a final project that depends on people other than myself. and when all is said and done i get to bind them in colored foam covers. (so the color spectrum lover in me is happy.) my move now is to start collecting these notes from people, just handwritten on little sheets of paper to scan and print in black and white for the pages.