beckyslogeris

one more time

2011-12-20T14:52:00.000-05:00

http://beckyslogeris.tumblr.com/

hopes and dreams

2011-11-29T22:35:00.000-05:00

one of almost 100 cards attached a la candy chang to the demolition site in east baltimore. student's hopes and dreams for the new east baltimore community school (ebcs). you can read the rest of them here.

the social studio is

2011-10-20T14:50:00.000-04:00

follow our blogs during the inaugural year: www.micasocialstudio.com

rape is not your fault

2011-10-06T12:10:00.000-04:00

Rape Is Not Your Fault from Rape Is Not Your Fault on Vimeo.

it was so exciting to see this project i've been working on with the city's sexual assault response team and the maryland coalition against sexual assault since july come to life in october. last june the baltimore sun prompted an investigation into the huge amount of rapes deemed unfounded by baltimore city police department. this campaign aims to reach out to all of the women who may have been ignored and connect them with the necessary resources and support. for more about the campaign, visit www.rapeisnotyourfault.com.

whitelock community farm

2011-09-27T12:26:00.000-04:00

whitelock community farm in reservoir hill just launched a kickstarter campaign! check it out, and if you're feeling generous, donate! they gave me lots of fresh and healthy food in exchange for designing this promotional postcard for them :)

baltimore book festival

2011-09-25T23:40:00.001-04:00

the first (of hopefully many) baltimore textbook workshop at the baltimore book festival. thank you to red emma's and the baltimore free school for inviting me!

and so it begins

2011-08-29T23:43:00.003-04:00

first day of classes.

mica's new master of art in social design.

real food farm mobile market is real!

2011-07-31T13:54:00.002-04:00

coming to a neighborhood near you (coldstream/homestead/montebello, darley park, belair-edison, south clifton park, 4x4, to name a few) full of fresh food! working with real food farm to develop their mobile markets was one of last year's center for design practice projects (http://www.micasocialdesign.com/real-food-farm/). it seems like forever ago that we were at this stage of the design process... so it's awesome to see everything actually come into fruition. and, word on the street, real food farm bumper stickers and totes are out and about as well.

for more about real food farm, go to realfoodfarm.org

one type orgasm after another

2011-07-07T19:22:00.004-04:00

unbelievably beautiful work from the master of type design students at the royal academy of arts in den haag - including mica's own, colin m. ford.

dude

2011-07-02T18:58:00.002-04:00

i dig this so so much. the dia's inside/out.

school days

2011-06-15T21:01:00.000-04:00

even though school's getting out and summer is technically starting, this public school poster struck my fancy...

greetings from the dirty south

2011-06-09T23:21:00.004-04:00

i've been in tennessee for the past few days at the children's defense fund ella baker child policy training institute (i know that's a mouthful...) getting ready for something called freedom school this summer in baltimore. the entire thing has been crazy overwhelming and way out of my comfort zone. (which, in theory, was exactly what i had wanted.) still, in the jam packed get up at 6 am get back at 11, and in a sea of 1,000+ other high energy college students, finding me time was necessary. i snuck away during lunch to the knoxville museum of art. i went to see ai wei wei's dropping the urn, and ended also up really enjoying anne wilson's local industry. (a beautiful 75 ft weaving.) but reading this ai wei wei journal entry was perfect timing. to me, it seemed to be justification for everything the week of training is about, in a language i can understand.

we have nothing

once, at a dinner, i made the comment that we live in the era most lacking in creativity, but that comment was made rather hastily. i almost never use the word ‘creativity,’ rather, i am more inclined to use fantasy, suspicion, discovery, subversion, or criticism, words whose accumulated capacity, in my opinion, define creativity. these are the fundamental requirements of the very substance of life. they are indispensable.

creativity is the power to reject the past, to change the status quo, and to seek new potential. simply put, aside from using one’s imagination – and perhaps more importantly – creativity is the power to act. only through actions can our expectations for change become reality, and only then can our purported creativity build a new foundation, and only then is it possible to draw out human civilization.

closing the open city

2011-05-15T10:07:00.001-04:00

all good things must come to an end, and this city has been open for far too long. come to the closing reception, tonight from 7 to 9m to pick up a free copy of our exhibition catalog! (126 pages, full color, essays by the likes of amy franceschini, howell baum, damon rich, doreen bolger, etc.) if you can't make it, but still want one, hit me up.

come one, come all!

2011-05-14T09:32:00.000-04:00

for mica's senior commencement exhibition, pretty much every inch of campus is turned into gallery space, and each student gets x amount of space to show their work/thesis. definitely something that would take dedication and an entire day to see...

friday, may 13 through monday, may 16

even more open city

2011-05-12T13:57:00.000-04:00

i had been wanting to take the power project prodigies on a little open city field trip before the exhibition closes may 15, so we finally made it out this week. they were quite the group, but it was nice to see how kids interacted with the work and the space. when we managed to pull them away from all the excitement of the sky space telescopes and the "we buy houses" house, we brainstormed a list of the things cities need, and made james rojas inspired models of our ideal open city. i was pleased to see a surplus of parks, lemonade stands, and zip lines.

still love me some bruce mau

2011-05-10T12:11:00.002-04:00

from "the secret to making a difference"

the reason why i haven't posted anything in over a month

2011-05-08T22:57:00.007-04:00

or at least one of them...
senior thesis = done! it feels really good. just have to figure out how to install it.

community arts 101

2011-04-26T17:44:00.002-04:00

giving kids disposable cameras and letting them go to town is like community arts 101. but i just developed the photos that the power project kids took of their neighborhood a lesson or so ago, and i am in love with them all.

and this is why i still believe in design

2011-04-23T21:56:00.004-04:00

seriously. it's been a long time since i've gotten this excited about something. emily pilloton visited the other day for a lecture and day-long workshop with kids in the masters of art in teaching program and design coalition class here at mica. everything she shared about the work she's doing with 11th graders in bertie county through studio h (still in progress) was so inspiring. everything is nitty gritty and local, without any higher objectives or forced scalability. (designing and building cornhole boards, chicken coops, or a farmers market is not something that would fly in every city.) any generative efforts can happen on their own, as all of the lesson plans are open sourced online. check it out!

the final countdown

2011-03-29T11:19:00.002-04:00

three more days until the open city opens! yeah...

super sweet poster above by jordan bernier.

finding inspiration in 1972

2011-03-25T23:36:00.005-04:00

i ordered this textbook (inquiring about cities) to help me with distilling large concepts about cities into a digestible language for kids. some of it is super strange, but there are definitely some gems hidden inside...

coming soon to an electric box near you...

2011-03-15T08:17:00.003-04:00

i'm glad baltimore open city believes in the "it's easier to ask for forgiveness than ask for permission" principle.

masd in good magazine

2011-03-13T23:09:00.003-04:00

can schools teach designers how to solve the world's problems? maybe now they'll finally give me that summer design internship? ha...

makes me smile

2011-03-09T22:38:00.003-05:00

seeing bits and pieces of the exhibition coming into fruition... our cardboard cutouts of open city advocates (come take pictures with them at the show!) and dan's crazy arsenal of exclusion mural (illustrated by the insanely talented lesser gonzales.)

my old roommate is awesome

2011-03-06T11:13:00.000-05:00

when he isn't designing sick stuff for under armor that gets featured on espn, james is thinking of the kids. this design (for the say something poster contest) is a favorite.

one-way streets and tourist bubbles

2011-03-05T16:05:00.002-05:00

my senior thesis is essentially taking all of the urban theory wisdom i've acquired from classes with dan d'oca and translating it into something that is digestible for kids. the main thing i'm working on is a textbook about baltimore, but in developing somewhat of a "curriculum" the process has taken me in some fun tangents, like these dry erase activity boards. special thanks to my fourth grade sounding board, briasia, who inspired me to make a potentially boring worksheet something that is fun to write on and use!

back in the day

2011-03-03T15:17:00.006-05:00

my friend jenna kit the jackpot the other day and found this awesome collection of old baltimore posters in the ub archives. oh so good.

we've been busy!

2011-02-27T14:03:00.006-05:00

it feels like just yesterday we were presenting our initial ideas for the exhibition to a panel of critics and producing wallpaper patterns like it was our job. and now we more or less have a month before the show goes live. (the opening is april 1st) there is definitely lots to see over on the baltimore open city blog...

friends of globe

2011-02-22T07:59:00.005-05:00

remember these guys ? globe's situation has gotten even more dire in the past year (read city paper's article, "pressed for time.") right now they're still taking jobs and struggling to pay rent until the right home comes along for their amazing collection of wood type. (mica, maybe?) some friends of mine have been awesome building support for globe on campus, with t-shirts and limited edition prints and a sweet blog. check 'em out! word on the street is that there will be an etsy super soon...

holding pattern

2011-02-17T15:02:00.002-05:00

my teacher, dan, found out yesterday that his firm's submission was selected for moma PS1's young architects program! the concept is super cool. they decided to use the money and courtyard space to purchase objects for places in the community around them based on what people said they need. there's rope for the sailing school, a ping pong table for a community center, and a picnic table for the taxi stand. my friend jenna and i worked on the identity and tagging system for the project, so our fingers have been crossed that it would be chosen! coming this summer to long island city...

i love you like

2011-02-13T23:43:00.004-05:00

i pulled a little inspiration from my friend 50 for a kate spade valentines day e-card. my design didn't make the final cut, but there are lots of other adorable options to choose from over at kate spade b mine...

love this project

2011-02-10T14:14:00.002-05:00

another cup production with mica alum michael cataldi (who is actually part of the agitated histories show opening at the contemporary tomorrow.) the nomadic classroom "worked with students in Brooklyn to re-imagine the classroom as a mobile, nomadic space, capable of sustaining their class activities indoors or out." the rules were as follows...

1. Nothing may be used as it was intended.
2. Everything must be collapsible and/or capable of being carried.
3. Must assemble or disassemble in 10 minutes or less.

penny postcards

2011-02-08T17:14:00.001-05:00

i have to find a way to sneak these into the exhibition...

in the market for a good sign painter font

2011-02-07T11:01:00.000-05:00

if only i could find this one...

totems

2011-01-19T08:09:00.000-05:00

such a sweet series.

RSA Animate - Changing Education Paradigms

2011-01-18T07:00:00.001-05:00

designing imperfection

2011-01-11T15:03:00.002-05:00

i'm sure i'm way late to the glitch as art thing... but i still dig it.

getting my cake on

2011-01-05T18:50:00.003-05:00

while i can't disclose my new hankering for cake baking, i can share my love for this "cake decorating: easy as 1, 2, 3" guide circa 1987. passed down from my grandma slogeris to my mom and now to me :)

michigan A's and baltimore O's

2011-01-03T09:53:00.003-05:00

my accent's pretty messed up. but this map makes it all so much clearer...

ho ho ho

2010-12-24T12:55:00.001-05:00

i regretted the idea of doing a baltimore wide secret santa (for my final project in my object of networks class) the minute it came out of my mouth. after a lot of stressful brainstorming sessions and a couple strokes of genius, i scaled it down a bit and went the tumblr route. (even though making something go "viral" in two weeks proved just as challenging.) i asked one question: what one thing would you give baltimore, if money was no limit? and waited for the results to come in. www.baltimoresecretsanta.tumblr.com
next challenge? what to do with all this juicy information? and while part of me was tempted to go sit on santa's lap dressed as the city of baltimore, delivering the city's wish list with a plate of cookies and a glass of milk to the mayor seemed more effective. miss stephanie rawlings-blake was out the morning i visited, but i did learn that she likes milk with her cookies...

grids glorious grids

2010-12-15T23:14:00.002-05:00

so beautiful. after a semester of publication design and messing around with crazy grids in indesign, i have so much respect for a good grid. this one was for the iabr's open city catalogue,
(actually a pretty boring book, but a good frame of reference for our own open city catalogue in eds this year.)

les meilleures choses dans la vie sont gratuites

2010-12-13T12:33:00.001-05:00

free typeface in homage to monsieur jean luc godard ici. c'est si bon!

love you, baltimore

2010-12-02T17:02:00.002-05:00

a mission to transform baltimore's beaten schools.

keep on keepin' on.

too good to be true?

2010-11-23T17:53:00.002-05:00

awesome old school artist books (the likes of lawrence weiner and bernd & hilla becher) scanned and on issuu to flip through and even download as pdfs? believe.

question everything

2010-11-23T16:23:00.004-05:00

let me know when you figure this one out, italy.

pretty paris/montpellier

2010-11-11T12:36:00.001-05:00

turns out one of my teachers at parsons paris (taylor holland) happens to take really awesome photos. (in addition to teaching design management kids that pie charts don't count as information graphics...) the shots above are the kinds of moments i was constantly hoping to stumble apon abroad. love them.

la photo du jour.

oh, canada!

2010-11-09T10:19:00.001-05:00

pretty much the sweetest data visualization in defense of buying local food from our friends up north.

new books are the best

2010-11-07T17:56:00.002-05:00

i've been going to town lately with amazon.com used books. these four feel pretty epic. i'm kinda wondering why it's taken me so long to find them...

rules for radicals

"an organizer working in and for an open society is in an ideological dilemma. to begin with, he does not have a fixed truth - truth to him is relative and changing; everything to him is relative and changing. he is a political relativist. he accepts the late justice learned hand's statement that 'the mark of a free man is that ever-gnawing inner uncertainty as to whether or not he is right.' the consequence is that he is ever on the hunt for the causes of man's plight and the general propositions that help to make some sense out of man's irrational world. he must constantly examine life, including his own, to get some idea of what it is all about, and he must challenge and test his own findings. curiosity becomes compulsive. his most frequent word is 'why?' does this mean that the organizer in a free society is rudderless? to the extent that he is free from the shackles of dogma, he can respond to the realities of the widely different situations our society presents. in the end he has one conviction - a belief that if people have the power to act, in the long run they will, most of the time, reach the right decisions."

placing words

"any thing that you see, hear, smell, or touch may make you think of something else. any element of the surrounding scene may serve as a link to memories of past events and distant places, to narratives that you have heard, and to facts that you have learned. these linkages may derive from reflexes, as with pavlov's dogs salivating at the sound of a bell. they may operate through resemblance, visual metaphor, metonymy, or synecdoche. they construct a virtual mise en scène on the substructure of the immediate physical one... the introduction of technologies for inscribing physical objects with text, and the associated practices of writing, distribution, and reading, created a new sort of information overlay."

relational aesthetics

"this 'chance' can be summed up in just a few words: learning to inhabit the world in a better way, instead of trying to construct it based on a preconceived idea of historical evolution. otherwise put, the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever the scale chosen by the artist."

pedagogy of the oppressed

"in problem-posing education men and women develop their power to perceive critically the way they exist in the world with which and in which they find themselves; they come to see the world not as a static reality but as a reality in the process of transformation."

j'aime beaucoup

2010-11-05T23:04:00.000-04:00

paris vs. nyc

project projects

2010-11-02T21:09:00.001-04:00

a partner from project projects came and lectured yesterday. i was especially digging all their bilingual exhibition graphics for the canadian center for architecture and the compact lil' inventory books books. seriously cool work. check 'em out y'all.

these make me so happy

2010-10-23T09:25:00.005-04:00

security envelope patterns on flickr.

jackpot!

2010-10-21T01:28:00.002-04:00

this flickr is pretty much like if someone found a french version of the book thing and proceeded to scan every page of every book with amazing vintage type and illustrations. i am in love.

urbanism in the house

2010-10-18T21:41:00.004-04:00

some finnish architect spitting rhymes about la ville radieuse and geodesic domes to house music? yes, please. this is by far the most enjoyable thing i've heard in a long time.

amen, tibor

2010-10-13T13:33:00.001-04:00

i wish i had this memorized. so many times when it would be the perfect ammo...

CLEAN

2010-10-11T15:21:00.001-04:00

our first assignment for advanced gd was to repackage something. anything. whatever our little hearts desired. the possibilities were pretty much endless = easily overwhelming. but i believe that every problem has an appropriate solution out there just waiting to be found, and that good design brings both together in an elegant way. so when i discovered the organization clean the world, i knew i had found a winner. this group takes leftover hotel soap and shampoo, recycles it through a steaming process, and sends it to haiti. why? because each year more than five million lives in the developing world are lost to diseases like acute respiratory infection and diarrheal disease. most of these deaths could be prevented with access to a simple bar of soap. and because every day in north america, thousands of hotels discard millions of pounds of soap & shampoo, which end up in overflowing landfills. talk about a need meeting an overabundance. to support the amazing work clean the world is already doing and provide them with another prong of attack, i decided to develop a sub-brand of soap to be sold in stores called clean. in the buy one send one style of toms and warby parker, i imagined clean the world partnering with a soap company already in existence for a limited run branded with the clean logo and the promise that for every bar of soap purchased, one would be sent to haiti. hey, in my ideal little world of hypothetical student design projects, it could totally happen...

just because you're 21

2010-10-10T12:42:00.007-04:00

doesn't mean you can't still learn a thing or two from children's books... i loved finding this while working on my re-packaging project for soap. a nice breather from the seriousness of the dieline.

monoprix = love

2010-10-04T12:51:00.000-04:00

so nice to see a familiar face in the amazing and prolific lettering work of letman.

collection a day

2010-10-02T21:52:00.005-04:00

i'm glad i'm not the only one who saves bread bag ties...

a collection a day

i love college

2010-10-01T01:21:00.011-04:00

wait. so i actually get to take a class where we talk about the interconnectivity of things in an intelligent way and make art that makes these complex systems visible? is this real life? i love that i can sign up for a sculpture class and not even get an assignment to make anything until week four because we've been busy reading baudrillard, heidegger, bruno latour, and linked. and that perusing websites like visual complexity constitutes "research." mmhm.

speaking of baltimore...

2010-09-30T22:11:00.004-04:00

i've been having way too much fun coming up with these patterns... i'm on what is sure to be a kick ass three person graphic design production team for this year's exhibition development seminar about baltimore and the open city. the graphic design group was tasked right from the get go with trying to come up with a logo - something somewhat hard to do when, at that point in time, we hadn't even collectively agreed on a name for it all. our solution? really look at the visual vernacular already surrounding our topic (baltimore: sign painting, globe posters, formstone, plywood) and come up with some systems that would be flexible enough to reflect where the class is at any point in time (right now: researching) and the broad scope we're attempting to cover. hence the patterns we've started to create with some really great imagery the class has dug up from archives. let the fun begin!

sweet

2010-09-25T11:37:00.003-04:00

how crazy does this poster make baltimore look? part of me kinda really wants it...

empower maryland

2010-09-21T17:21:00.004-04:00

today is the last day for the cdp conceived and designed "empower maryland mobile information station" at mica, before it moves on to other college campuses in the area. this is the culmination of a project started a year or so ago with the maryland energy administration, where the group of students came up with 15 things to "empower" people to save money (who doesn't want to do that?) and reduce power consumption statewide 15% by 2015. pretty cool.

here's their list:

1. use cfls instead of incandescents ($65 over the life of the bulb)
2. use cold water in washing machine ($63 a year)
3. unplug your tv when not in use ($159.76 annually)
4. install a low-flow showerhead/take shorter showers
5. unplug your laptop when not in use ($15.60 annually)
6. turn down temp of water heater to warm setting (120 degrees)
7. unplug gaming system when not in use ($25.73 annually)
8. wash only full loads of dishes/air dry
9. use curtains or shades to give ac a break
10. use ceiling/other fans so you can raise the thermostat
11. pump up your tires (improve gas milage by 3%)
12. bike, walk, take public transportation (save up to $115 per year on gas by reducing miles driven 5%)
13. turn thermostat back 10%-15% for 8 hours (save as much as 10% on energy bill)
14. turn off lights when not in use
15. set refrigerator temp between 37 - 40 degrees

check out more pics of the project here.

(photo cred: lauren adams)

down on the farm

2010-09-21T14:56:00.002-04:00

working hard, or hardly working? just kidding. i seriously think i found my calling harvesting beans at real food farm last week. (one of the cdp's food related partners for the fall. the other is great kids farm.) i tried to explain to my dad how this is part of a design class i'm taking this semester. he seemed a little upset. i guess he imagined i'd be working in a studio or something. oh well, i love it. the immersion before starting a project is always the best part.

you wanna what now?

2010-09-16T16:06:00.000-04:00

funky type aside, this goes out to all the midwesterners who ever moved somewhere else and realized how silly they sound. popvssoda.com

i guess i don't hate advertising that much...

2010-09-15T00:03:00.006-04:00

but i do wonder why i never saw darth vader at my mcdos in paris. especially since the couple in the background making out was there every time...

from an ad blog called "bumbumbum" brought to my attention by my favorite little lover of advertising, kristin wellmer.

pretty pretty

2010-09-13T23:01:00.002-04:00

pleasant surprises from some recent soap researching. don't ask. you'll find out soon enough...

"don't make something unless it is both necessary and useful. but if it is, don't hesitate to make it beautiful." -shaker adage

the jolly rodger

2010-09-12T14:49:00.004-04:00

it didn't take a lot of schelping 12 ft ladders up and down stairs and waiting for paint to dry (to apply second, third, fourth, and fifth coats) for me to decide that commodore wouldn't be like any other design project i've ever done, but would probably be the most rewarding. a week or so ago the new and improved commodore john rogers elementary and middle school re-opened with a celebration for hundreds of students and their parents, with local tv crews to boot and special appearances from mayor rawlings-blake and bcps ceo dr. alonzo. i couldn't have been more proud to see the final product all come together, and to have been able to contribute a little bit to all the love and hard work poured into it by so many people over the summer. you can read more about commodore's inspiring story in this urbanite article.

(the logo and all banners designed by james anderson. he's awesome.)

it feels good to be home...

2010-08-31T19:38:00.003-04:00

all i can say is, i'm finally excited again. after taking a break from social design (or any design for that matter...) abroad, i can breathe a sign of serious relief being back in baltimore and back at mica thinking about things that get me going again. one thing i knew would help was coming back to be part of mica's center for design practice after my hiatus. and mostly for the selfish purpose that i knew if i was going to survive senior year, i needed to re-connect with that energy again. the attitude that says design does have meaning. and that how you learn design, practice design, live design doesn't have to follow a template. (yes, i'm a twenty-something.)

we watched the documentary on rural studio during class called "citizen architect." (you should totally watch the trailer.) i've been stressing more or less all summer about life after mica and money and the real world and getting a job. but who better than samuel mockbee to say that you shouldn't go to college to make more money, but to learn how you can contribute and help the world. and it doesn't have to be anything crazy. we don't all have to be the dalai lama or barack obama. so long as the little things we do are positive contributions in some way to the people and places around us.

sounds mighty good to me...

abc's

2010-08-29T17:01:00.000-04:00

this totally came to me by way of a chain email from my grandpa... but, nonetheless, it's pretty sweet. they are (or were?) actually at american visionary museum here in baltimore. dalton ghetti. makes me smile.

best of both worlds

2010-08-21T19:18:00.000-04:00

i think this is by far my most successful combination of my two favorite cultures yet: velveeta and hot dogs + red wine. sounds sort of disgusting. but trust me. it's delicious.

pilgrimage

2010-08-20T18:58:00.003-04:00

want to talk about a quickie? how about packing up to go to toronto for 12 hours. all summer i’d been scheming to see a show called “universally local” put on by the institute without boundaries (of bruce mau fame.) with no car and little money, going from michigan, as close and convenient as it would be, just wasn’t working. no matter how hard i tried. but, being back in baltimore with a newfound (and much needed) sense of liberation and my days of summer quickly ticking away, i knew if i didn’t go i would seriously regret it. i needed to do something crazy. and i needed to see if the school i had been gaga about since massive change really was all it’s cracked up to be. (because sometimes there’s a major discrepancy between website and actuality. cough, cough. parsons, paris.)

of course, with my luck, i show up to find that the exhibition i stuck out a four hour bus ride to new york and 10 hour bus ride from there to toronto just to see was in the process of being taken down. talk about epic fail. but i can’t think of anything better happening. this bump in the road meant that i got to have a copy of the big ol' exhibition book (for free), take a tour of the studio (and see it in action), and meet with the program coordinator. none of which would have happened if i had just been able to walk in, see the show, and walk out as planned.

as my day went on, it hit me more and more what an unintentional pilgrimage the trip had become. something about going on my own, and having to work a little bit to get there (the lady sitting next to me on the mega bus seriously smelled.) wandering around toronto, i spotted a familiar sign from across the street and a block away. bruce mau design. i impatiently waited for a lull in the traffic to cross over and follow the arrow. seeing it gave me the same exact feeling as seeing ellen lupton for the first time in café doris. flustered. i didn’t even have to see bruce mau himself. all it took was a sign with his name on it.

while i'm still processing all of the information thrown at me during the day about the institute and their projects, on an emotional level I have it all figured out. that program (or something like it) in that city (or someplace like it) is a definite need to do sometime in my life. it might not happen next year, it still feels strangely too soon, but it’s a piece i’ll keep anxiously in my back pocket to put in play when the time is right…

the third teacher

2010-08-11T23:53:00.002-04:00

when i got an email at the start of the summer from the amazing living classrooms about a graphic design internship opportunity at a baltimore public school, i flipped. it was perfect timing. i had just gotten bruce mau's new book, the third teacher, and had bringing design into education on the brain. the internship involves a school named commodore john rodgers, a school that was deemed "failed" under no child left behind. and, on top of that, i just learned yesterday that i ranks 867 out of the 870 schools in maryland.

needless to say, they needed help. enter living classrooms. brought in as a "turn around specialist," they have fired every single teacher, torn down walls, picked bright new paint colors, put in new floors and lighting, gotten the community excited about the school's new image, and (i'm sure) more behind the scenes stuff that i'm not even aware of. what they've been tasked to do, on a relatively small budget, is incredible.

my interning partner in crime (and coincidentally new roommate) has already been busting his butt coming up with a logo, letterhead, t-shirts, posters, etc. as part of the big re-branding. and now that i'm back in baltimore, we're moving on to the part where you get your hands dirty... coming up with bold, text heavy mural designs for stairwells and picking our paint swatches.

school starts in three weeks. we have our work cut out for us. should be fun :)

as an addendum to the above, check out an old favorite of mine (publicolor) plus a new inspiration (paula scher's work with achievement first.)

summer reading

2010-08-08T23:21:00.005-04:00

although it's been a while since i actually had a required summer reading list (that stopped with high school...) summer still means having plenty o' time to be lazy and lounge around reading. from succumbing to eat, pray, love (i was super skeptical at first) to an alain de botton kick aided by my friend katie, here's what i've been reading, and the parts i dog eared...

"though such sensory blindness is often rather welcome, particularly when one is performing an operation during a shell barrage in the first world war, it is worth pointing out that feeling things (which usually means feeling them painfully) is at some level linked to the acquisition of knowledge. a sprained ankle quickly teaches us about the body's weight distribution; hiccups force us to notice and adjust to hitherto unknown aspects of the respiratory system; being jilted by a lover is a perfect introduction into the mechanisms of emotional dependency. in fact, in proust's view, we don't really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as we had hoped."
(from how proust can change your life)

"our sensitivity to our surroundings may be traced back to a troubling feature of human psychology: to the way we harbour within us many different selves, not all of which feel equally like 'us' so much so that in certain moods, we can complain of having come adrift from what we judge to be our true selves. unfortunately, the self we miss at such moments, the elusively authentic, creative and spontaneous side of our character, is not ours to summon at will. our access to it is, to a humbling extent, determined by the places we happen to be in, the colour of the bricks, the height of the ceilings and the layout of the streets. in a hotel room strangled by three motorways, or in a waste land of run-down tower blocks, our optimism and sense of purpose are liable to drain away, like water from a punctured container. we may start to forget that we ever had ambitions or reasons to feel spirited and hopeful. we depend on our surroundings obliquely to embody the moods and ideas we respect and then to remind us of them. we look to our buildings to hold us, like a kind of psychological mould, to a helpful vision of ourselves. we arrange around us material forms which communicate to us what we need - but are at constant risk of forgetting we need - within. we turn to wallpaper, benches, paintings and streets to staunch the disappearance of our true selves."
(from the architecture of happiness)

"big deal. so you fell in love with someone. don't you see what happened? this guy touched a place in your heart deeper than you thought you were capable of reaching. i mean you got zapped, kiddo. but that love you felt, that's just the beginning. you just got a taste of love. that's just limited little rinky-dink mortal love. wait till you see how much more deeply you can love than that. heck, you have the capacity to someday love the whole world. it's your destiny. don't laugh."
(from eat, pray, love.)

"a critic looking at these tightly focused, targeted interventions might dismiss them as band-aid solutions. but that phrase should not be considered a term of disparagement. the band-aid is an inexpensive, convenient, and remarkably versatile solution to an astonishing array of problems. in their history, band-aids have probably allowed millions of people to keep working or playing tennis or cooking or walking when they would otherwise have had to stop. the band-aid solution is actually the best kind of solution because it involves solving a problem with the minimum amount of effort and time and cost. we have, of course, an instinctive disdain for this kind of solution because there is something in all of us that feels that true answers to problems have to be comprehensive, that there is virtue in the dogged and indiscriminate application of effort. that slow and steady should win the race. the problem, of course is that the indiscriminate application of effort is something that is not always possible. there are times when we need a convenient shortcut, a way to make a lot of a little, and that is what tipping points, in the end, are all about."
(from the tipping point.)

"through romantic fatalism, we avoid the unthinkable thought that the need to love is always prior to our love for anyone in particular. our choice of partner necessarily operates within the bounds of whom we happen to meet and, given different bounds, different flights, different historical periods or events, it might not have been chloe i would have loved at all - something i could not contemplate now that it was her i had actually begun to love. my mistake had been to confuse a destiny to love with a destiny to love a given person. it was there error that think that chloe, rather than love, was inevitable."
(from on love)

lego love

2010-07-24T14:33:00.004-04:00

public art is a tough one. and something i thought a lot about sophomore year when i found myself mixing concrete and calling it site-specific for a semester. (one place after another is an awesome book on the topic.) how do you take a piece of art out of the studio and into the world? do people want it? will it get in the way? (titled arc anyone?) but this project, "dispatch work," brings forward the best of the being organic, and working with what is already there. throwing someone off their everyday routine with something that makes you stop and smile. unobtrusive, unpretentious. i'm jealous that jan vormann had the creative genius to come up with something so simple and poetic, and the ability to implement it across the world, in places as different from one another as tel aviv and toulouse.

is there life after college?

2010-07-15T23:28:00.001-04:00

the realization that i only have one more year before i enter the so called "real world" has kind of started to freak me out. so here's my plan. i'm moving to canada and making street signs until the economy gets better.

my favorite piece of propaganda

2010-07-14T00:02:00.000-04:00

i don't know why i didn't grab this one from the v&a when i saw it. (probably something to do with having no room in my suitcase and being completely broke.) because now i really want it...

please mail overseas. please mail overseas.

learning to love where you're at

2010-07-10T18:42:00.004-04:00

i'm not going to lie. being home has been really, really hard. but a big lesson came from a day of coney dogs, walking around detroit with my dad, and a design 99 (of power house project fame) lecture at mocad. what is it about this kind of art that has always gotten me excited? these artists make work that respond to the conditions around them. it's about creating and using life's circumstances. they are somehow able to focus on the abundance in a city of vacant lots and decreasing population. if they can find beauty in foreclosed property, why can't i find the positive in a summer that hasn't exactly gone as planned? starting now, i'm going to try.

boys and girls

2010-06-26T14:02:00.004-04:00

this should blow your mind.

story time

2010-06-26T13:20:00.002-04:00

a good friend from high school asked me to meet her somewhere for drinks last night. with my parents already in their pajamas, my brother's car in the shop, and my bike in baltimore, i was pretty much stuck at home. just out of curiousity, i google mapped it. estimated travel time with walking directions to my destination? an hour and twenty-five minutes. yup. and even though i usually average a good 10 to 15 minutes less than google guesses, that realization was ridiculous. it's hard to come back from a city where you could just go. anywhere. and i wonder why i'm loosing my mind right now...

ok. enough whining for one day. i'll stop now.

mind the gap

2010-06-24T17:57:00.002-04:00

one perk of studying abroad? seeing how different places graphically expressed the danger of closing doors. i wish i had taken more pictures in other cities. but i have to say that i think the weird rabbit on the rer was my favorite...

clockwise from left: london, paris, brussels, back in the usa

the coming insurrection

2010-06-19T23:08:00.000-04:00

sometime last fall i picked up the coming insurrection from an anarchist coffee shop in baltimore. all i had to do was read the back cover to know it would be coming home with me. and i had every intention of reading it before i left for france. you know, for context and such. (the book is associated with a group that sabotaged electrical lines on the national railways in 2008.) but for such a small book, it's a surprisingly dense read. you definitely have to be in the mood, and willing to reread sentences and paragraphs multiple times.

now that i'm back in the us of a i've finally finished it. and i'm glad i was able to get some france under my belt to know first hand about things like edf and la défense. or to see graffiti about greece and "l'insurrection qui vient" on a visit to brussels. and while, as with any extremist position, it's smart to take the whole of it with a grain of salt and pick and choose the pieces that resonate with you, it's worth the read for the many morsels of brilliance hidden inside. you can read the entire thing here.

"it's useless to wait - for a breakthrough, for the revolution, the nuclear apocalypse or a social movement. to go on waiting is madness. the catastrophe is not coming, it is here. we are already situated within the collapse of a civilization. it is within this reality that we must choose sides."

nice

2010-06-13T14:24:00.010-04:00

the power of lyrics? when they're really good, they resonate. and they let you know that you're not alone.

there's more where these came from. if you go to music philosophy.

reverse culture shock is real

2010-06-08T21:10:00.004-04:00

coming home is like pulling of a band aid. you know it's going to hurt. but you have to do it eventually. and you find ways to cope. you replace crepes with slurpees, the metro with your dad's mini van, the actual eiffle tower with a desktop screen saver, and going to the marais with going to your brother's graduation. you do things like turn french subtitles on when you watch episodes of friends. and you drink lots of coffee. it's dumb to think that you can go away someplace for five months and not experience things or change in ways that will make it hard to leave. but ultimately, all it takes is a quote from the oc to help you pull yourself back together.

"the sooner you realize things will never be the same again, the sooner you can move on."

dreamlands

2010-05-26T11:05:00.005-04:00

i made sure to make a pit stop at pompidou before i headed home for dreamlands, a new exhibition about the relationship between real cities and their fabricated counterparts. the show connects so many different ideas and work in a really fresh way. some martin parr photos, la tour eiffel and paris partout, the craziness that was walt disney's initial vision of epcot, delirious new york, and learning from las vegas, to name a few. feeling inspired, i just started reading the 1972 investigation of vegas architecture. i can already tell it's going to be a treat...

"learning from the existing landscape is a way of being revolutionary for an architect. not the obvious way, which is to tear down paris and begin again, as le corbusier suggested in the 1920's, but another, more tolerant way; that is to question how we look at things... we look backward at history and tradition to go forward; we can look downward to go upward. and withholding judgment may be used as a tool to make later judgment more sensitive. this is a way of learning from everything."

it's about time i posted these...

2010-05-20T15:20:00.005-04:00

paris playlists. part un et deux. sort of a random selection, but il y a une histoire derrière chacune chanson... plus ou moins.

oops

2010-05-18T21:32:00.004-04:00

so maybe booking a trip to london my last weekend here was a bad idea. at least after the volcanic ash cloud decided to wreak a little havoc once again and keep us grounded an extra night. which wouldn't have been a big deal if it didn't keep me from my last crit/sort of pretty important final presentation for a project i've been working on all semester with alcatel lucent/bell labs. our job has been to research and develop from start to finish a communication tool (think skype, facebook, gmail) for a specific user. (i ended up designing something called "mailbox" for elementary school aged kids.) i'll admit that i was skeptical about the class at first, but i really have learned a lot of valuable things along the way. everything from product analysis and positioning, user research and ethnography, wireframing and mapping, how to use the student's t-test, and really getting to the nitty gritty of interactivity. it would have been nice to wrap the project all up with a bow today, but i guess i'll write this post about it instead. thank you mother nature. we are officially fighting.

a dash of paprika et un peu de seripop

2010-05-14T18:39:00.006-04:00

gallerie anatome does it again. (since i've been here they've had the thonik exhibition & a show featuring "les plus beaux livres français.") except this time they're paying homage to some fellow french speaking designers in canada: paprika & seripop. i only took pictures of seripop (sorry paprika. your stuff was too tame.) so definitely check out their websites.

voila...

2010-05-13T15:51:00.003-04:00

the fruits of my motion graphic labor.

more french finds

2010-05-11T19:22:00.010-04:00

jean julien

supercinq

le club des chevreuils

apparently you have to leave the country to hit the jackpot on cool design stuff. j'ai trouvé quand j'étais à copenhague a few weeks ago.

work in progress

2010-05-07T15:50:00.002-04:00

data visualization of every time i took the metro this semester. a good "closure" project if i do say so myself...

keep moving

2010-05-01T20:10:00.005-04:00

"a man of ordinary talent will always be ordinary, whether he travels or not - but a man of superior talent (which i cannot deny myself to be without being impious) will go to pieces if he remains forever in the same place." - mozart

found on a bench at the train station in amsterdam. words of wisdom for a weary soul at the end of a weeks worth of traveling. more pictures (hopefully) soon...

this would never fly in paris...

2010-04-21T13:01:00.010-04:00

different numbers on every door? what?

a weekend in brussels with bonnie... wonderful.

design bureau

2010-04-15T11:22:00.002-04:00

i had way too much fun being a creeper around julien berthier's studio out at fort d'aubervilliers. my friend tracey is writing freelance articles for the new design bureau and asked me to come along and take photos of her interview with julien. so official. but check out his work. really sweet sculptures and installations.

edit: here's the article. apparently he wanted it to focus more on the drawings. oh, well!

someone totally went to town in la motte-picquet the other night

2010-04-13T12:41:00.004-04:00

i liked it. a lot.

some cool cats

2010-04-10T20:11:00.009-04:00

being somewhat skeptical of the french world of graphic design from the start, finding something that resonates with me, it doesn't even need to be for anything more than aesthetic reasons, will stop me dead in my tracks. antoine+manuel totally did that for me. their stuff is crazy cool. check it out.

happy easter

2010-04-04T07:29:00.000-04:00

from geneva.

wallpaper

2010-04-01T03:20:00.001-04:00

finally made our way to versailles... it was a sunday so we got herded around the place like cattle. but even with swarms of tourists around, bobbing their heads in into every picture you take, it was impossible to get a bad shot. the place is just too beautiful.

pergola @ palais de tokyo

2010-03-31T19:53:00.002-04:00

zoom in. you're gonna wanna read this one...

preaching to the choir

2010-03-27T13:05:00.009-04:00

interestingly enough, the same chair of the communication department who scoffed at me at the start of the semester about wanting to do design but not advertising ("who are you going to work for, adbusters?") invited jonathan barnbrook to parsons paris for a 24 hour lecture/workshop this weekend (a guy who has done quite a bit of work with adbusters.) needless to say i soaked up every morsel of wholesome design advice. it was pretty awesome. and i think i had been needing that. here's some of what he had to say...

- don't say something in your work if you don't believe it.
- don't be afraid to criticize your own profession.
it is how we make it better.
- language is the ammunition we use to change society. typography is the weapon.
- not everything should be legal. that would be boring.
- interesting design doesn't happen in design annuals. it happens in the streets.
- styles come and go. true experiment is not about change of form.
it's about change of thought.
- being a graphic designer doesn't mean that you stop when you get home. you bring that with you no matter where you go.
- people who are bored are boring.
- ethics are relative. but at least you should have them.
- defining a problem in a boring way means you will come up with a boring solution.
- be authentic with how you experience life. your work is only relevant if it is your life and if it is now.
- it's easier to be poor when you are wrong.
- don't get distracted from what you want to do.
- being a student designer is an active process. you have to go out and find how the world is interesting.
- good ideas can be destroyed by bad presentation.
- have a desire to change the world. don't be embarrassed to want to do this.
- if you're work is good, you will get noticed.
- (and last but not least) be nice.

the french are funny about fonts

2010-03-24T21:25:00.010-04:00

and just when you think that they've got it... you see some random usage of hobo or papayrus. nonetheless, here are some examples of times i think the french did exceptionally well in the realm of type.