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.