Drink the Wild Air

Amber requested I make this quote into something she could have printed on a canvas for her apartment, so tada!

I always love me a good excuse to design.

*song = Harry Connick Jr.’s (Must’ve Been ‘ol) Santa Claus

Two Years Later, A Blog Makeover

After two years, I have finally given my blog a redesign. I have to admit, it wasn’t entirely willing – I logged onto my blog last week only to discover that the cityscape background I loved had disappeared. Not cool.

However, I have decided it was a sign that I should change everything. I’ve been pining for some extra width to publish larger photos forever. Plus, when I started this blog, blogger was worlds more restricted than it is now and I hadn’t even started my design classes. Now that I’ve relinquished the old layout I was so attached to, I’ll probably be messing around with the way this site looks a lot more. Look forward to more changes in the future!

Coincidentally, it is almost exactly two years since I started this blog. And three years ago last week I started my first blog as I embarked on London Study Abroad (I can’t believe it’s been that long!).  For those of you who think I deserve a grander celebration of my three years of blogging, like say a  trip to London where it all began, I will gladly accept all cash and checks.

So, old design, I bid you adieu.  You were very good to me.



(Side note: At the risk of jinxing things, I just want to express that I love my trusty old hp laptop so much because even after four years of my lugging it all over the world, it still constantly runs the 2000 programs I demand of it quickly and at the same time).

*song = Back Here by BBMAK (sometimes you have to indulge in a little boy band action. for my fellow Londonites, there’s some great London footage.  Just sayin’) 

Update: now I’m stuck in an endless loop of watching 90’s and early 2000’s music videos.  Ooops.  This best of the 90’s pop video is a Winner.

My Umbrella-ella-ella-a

I spent today making this, as per the request of my sister for her new apartment.  There was a random thunderstorm in the middle of the day while I was working on it, which I thought was quite appropriate.

I watched three movies while doing it (The Cove, Coraline and How to Train Your Dragon), but that isn’t quite as blog worthy…

(Oh and in case you’re wondering, I am still in DC playing the waiting game.  I’ll let you know when that changes!)

*song = the Glee Singing in the Rain/Umbrella mashup.

Doodle Time

Life has been so crazy that I never got around to blogging about one of my awesome birthday presents.  Tired of having to use my finger on my touch pad when using Illustrator, I asked for one of those tablets where you can use an electric pen.  And it’s like magic.

Now I can doodle like this all the time!  Yay design.

*song = Camera Obscura’s Lloyd I’m Ready to Be Heartbroken.

It’s Coming…

Graduation is almost here.  It’s weird, I know.

But I got to have fun making announcements for my roomie Rebecca and myself. The colors are a little brighter in real life, but you get the idea!

Also, there will be more pictures from this past weekend up soon, I just haven’t had time to edit them all yet!  Darn schoolwork.

Song = Sister in Love by Envelopes because it is a happy song and it was sunny outside today.  The end.

Dastardly Design Distractions

Tomorrow I have my very first Geology test. So, naturally I decided now would be an excellent time for me to find some design inspiration. Even though I have nothing to design at the moment. And the test will definitely be happening tomorrow.

Some fun things I found/aspire to:

1.From Eggpress. If you can’t tell already from previous posts, I have a minor obsession for this Portland company.

2. This is awesome on so many levels. I would love to design something like this. You can download the actual file here.

3. Let’s be honest. I’m just obsessed with anything that involves bikes. And all of the designs from Coquette Paper and Press’ etsy shop are just clean and beautiful.

4. And these from Color Me Katie are photos, but aren’t their vision just beautiful? I want to do that.

I cut myself off from the search before I lost all of my studying time, but do you guys have any design sites you love? Also, do any of you know if upgrading to the CS5 Design Suite is worth it?

*Lingering Still by She & Him has been lingering in my mind today.

Competing Cards

So, the Department of Communications had a Christmas card competition and I decided to submit something just for kicks. I’m always looking for an excuse to design something since I don’t get to use InDesign for any of my classes any more. I miss InDesign.

It was just something simple, but it was totally worth it because they ended up giving everyone who entered a gift card. It was also fun because they put all of them on display in the HFAC (above) until last week, so I got to pretend like I was a cool artsy person.

Here’s a pic (from my cell ‘cuz apparently I lost the others) of the card in case you have any desire to see it. It had to incorporate the theme “I am a light come unto the world” from John 12:46.

*Also, since I know you’ve been wondering, Train Song by Feist and Ben Gibbard has been stuck in my head the past few days. It is wonderful.

Chaos

I’m absolutely awful at time management, so with all of my end of the year projects due for school my life has been like a crazy whirlwind. It doesn’t help that I can’t stop doing the fun things too (pictures in Salt Lake coming later). My teacher actually had to make me to slow down when I was reading today because I’d gotten too used to going too fast and no one could follow.

But I just turned in my biggest project, for history of creativity (the class I talked about before), so I thought I would share it with you. We could do any creative project involving the material from the class, so I thought it would be fun to make a magazine since I liked it so much when I did it last year. Plus, it’s a project you can do while watching tv. A lot of tv. And movies. It’s definitely not my best work, but it’s still kind of fun. To see my ideal magazine that I spent a lot more time perfecting, go here. This one is supposed to be a magazine as if it were from the Byzantine time period. And it’s a “special party issue” with ideas of how to throw parties with themes of the time periods that came before it. Hopefully my professor thinks this is a creative idea…

(You can click on the pages to make them bigger)

I’ve been going to sleep past 3 a.m. for the past few days, so I just can’t wait at all to get in my bed tonight and stay there…

The Mini-Resume

I’m going to Vegas next week for the Society of Professional Journalists National Convention, and when my professor sent us a list of things to pack, he included on it resumes. This made me excited because of an idea from one of our briefers in D.C. They said one of the coolest things they had seen was a girl who gave them a business card that was really a mini-resume. Ever since I’ve wanted to make one for myself. If you think about it, the idea makes a ton of sense, especially for those of us who theoretically should be starting to think about looking for a job. Or something.

This provided me an excellent excuse to play with InDesign, which I have been missing. I only ordered 20 cards because I really anticipate giving maybe one away, but it was still pretty fun playing grown-up. Maybe they’ll have one of those sweet business card raffle jars and I can stick one of these in.

You’ll have to let me know what you think, though, since this was an experiment. I couldn’t decide between super traditional and, well, something that would stand out but could be potentially tacky, so I tried to design something in between. During one of my summer jobs I literally went through stacks and stacks of resumes of people applying for teaching positions at PCC, and I saw a lot of over the top ones that turned me off (all pink floral with a scent? Is that necessary?), but also millions more that looked like they had used the same template in Word.

Which reminds me, I should probably work on my real resume because I definitely used one of those Word templates. My bad.

Front:

Back:

My Magazine

I finished my final project for my publication design class and I'm pretty excited about it. We had to create 6 pages of our own magazine from scratch. We started with a blank page and had to come up with our own concepts and find all of the art and everything, so it took a lot of time but I'm really happy with the result, and I hope you like it too. You can even click them to make them bigger if you want.

A fun note, the pictures on page five (of the girls in dresses) were taken by my friend Olivia from high school. She goes to NYU now and has her own company called Olivia Renee Photography. You should check out her Web site or her blog because she is cool.

What I Do

I know I've been slacking in the picture department lately, so to try and make up for it a little bit here are some pictures of the things I've been working on.

As a new media and design major (in the print journalism program) we've been working on newspaper design in one of my classes, so below are a couple of projects. I even got to use my own pictures for the India tab.

For my photojournalism class this past week our assignment was to take pictures of food, so this is what I've been eating for dinner every night this week. Yes, I made it all and I'm quite proud of myself. However, it has never looked quite as good since the first day. It's an absolute miracle that I didn't burn the grilled cheese sandwich for these pictures. I haven't been able to repeat that feat ever since.

For a little bonus for you guys I'm even going to include the behind the scenes pictures of the chaos behind the food shoot. I know you're excited.

Also, for those of you who want to know, this song (You Make My Dreams by Hall & Oats) has been perpetually stuck in my head for the past month or two, so if I ever look like I'm about to start dancing this is why.

Look Up

A quick note: please admire the beauty of my title image, because it took me forever to make.

Thank you, and that is the end.