Oh I am finally musically excited!

#1. Just found norwegian super awesome rockster, ida maria. She's like an angrier Feist and when she screams she sounds like bjork! very cool.
Stella
I Like You So Much Better When You're Naked
oh lol, did she happen to read my diary when she came up with this

#2. HELLO NEW FRANZ FERDINAND ALBUM COMING UP
And holy shit, "What She Came For" sounds so amazing played live, i need to hear them live again. NME's preview of the album says:

'Lucid Dreams' is the real curveball, though. Whereas the version released on Itunes earlier this year was angular Franz-by-numbers, here the song becomes an amorphous 8-minute epic that slowly coalesces into a hefty slab of brutal minimalist techno. It's properly mental.

See, the Lucid Dreams that I know is quite a sweet track, literally. Hummable and pleasant. But 'brutal minimalist techno'! Intriguing! Exciting! I can't wait!

Damn damn they're playing in London on 1 Dec at a cafe to preview their tracks. There you go, another point to add to my list of Why I Should Be in London & Why Can't My Ancestors Have Squatted Over Prime Real Estate That Would Make Us Obscenely Rich So That My Parents Can Send Me To Crazy Expensive London Art School.



*all links will bring you to youtube clips. yeah cos embedding videos suck and make things lag y/n?

My biscuits have failed me.

I'll tell you what I need this Christmas. I need a new best friend to fill up a slot that will be vacated sometime next year. Yes, I AM REALLY SAD.

But! I am pleased with myself though, because I have re-organized my paper drawers! They are now categorized according to size and the occasional neat freak in me even slipped them into different clear plastic bags:
- EXACTLY A5
- Assorted type; smaller than A4
- Cartridge paper; smaller than A4
- EXACTLY A4
- Assorted type; smaller than A3
- EXACTLY A3

And! I have two huge Art Friend bags that each contain scrap pieces of mounting/foam board and art card. I feel such triumph.

I feel the need to be more clever.

Yeah, that pretty much sums it up.

another list from a facebook group :D

You know you're a graphic designer when...

1. You have bags under your eyes so big you'd have to check them in at Heathrow Airport
   
2. You watch the superbowl just for the commercials 
   
3. You can spot bad typography from 100 yds away
   
4. You are pro-facebook because 95% of the myspace accounts burn your retinas
   
5. You can name more than 200 fonts in under five minutes
   
6. You are completely immune to subliminal advertising
   
7. You look upon a well-designed project with either: sympathy OR extreme jealousy 
8. Your hand is permanently stuck in the shape of a mouse
   
9. You tell stories of exacto-knife inflicted wounds with grizzled sort of pride
   
10. You practically take caffeine intravenously 
    
11. You have an appreciation for everything unique
    
12. You've been spending three days non-stop on a project and it still looks like shit. You find yourself overcome by Deathlust.
    
13. "You find your pulse increase at the sight of a lovely ligature, glasses steam up when an unusually elegant arm, leg, or tail comes in view, and a well-kerned paragraph is apt to make you break into a sweat with excitement."
    
14. You know you're a Graphic Designer when... you buy a CD or DVD for the artwork, even if you have no idea what the actual music or film is like. (even worse, you don't actually watch or listen to it, just stare at it for hours and hug it in adoration)
15. You know you're a Graphic Designer when... you look at the clock and see it's about midnight and think 'I'll go to bed now'... and you actually go to bed about 2-3am
    
16. You know you're a Graphic Designer when... you need someone else to point out that you're sitting in a room in front of the computer with all the lights off, and haven't noticed
    
17. ...when you know what "kerning" is and you really, really like it.
    
18. ... when you wear two [ke] [rn] pins on your bag, and only you know what the mean. To others its probably a band of sorts.."
    
19. Forget the boy-wonder and the man of steel; your heroes have names like 'Tibor Kalman', 'Stefan Sagmeister', 'Paul Rand', and 'Paula Scher'.
    
20. You don't wear black to look cool, you wear it to hide the gauche.
    
21. You have a thing for chairs. You don't know why.
    
22. You giggle whenever you use the colors F0CCED, EFF0FF and 44DDDD
    
23. You’re in the sun and you look around for a Drop Shadow to sit under. 
    
24. You give your relatives a lecture about color spaces and profiles when you email them your vacation photos.
    
25. Seeing someone use Lens Flare or Comic Sans adversely affects your blood-pressure
    
26. You maintain a grid system for your refrigerator magnets.
    
27. You organize your CD collection according to the Pantone chart.
    
28. You sit at work for eight hours straight just looking at your monitor, waiting for a spark of inspiration that doesn't come.
29. You're up 'til 5am because you came up with the best idea ever while brushing your teeth.
    
30. The hottest dream you ever had was "Trace contour... Find Edges... Pinch... Extrude... Smudge Stick... Motion Blur.... Sprayed Strokes..."
    
31. You know Lorem Ipsum by heart.
    
32. Looking at a menu make you go "hmmm, ITC Baskerville italic" rather than "mmmm, lunch!"
    
33. You use words about fonts you dislike that other normal people reserve for fascist dictators and serial killers.
    
34. Apple+Z is the first thing that goes through your mind if you drop and break something.
    
35. Kerning and leading on your shopping list actually matters to you, and you don't see a problem with that.
    
36. You know that "bleeding" doesn't hurt.
37. When you know the difference between fuchsia, magenta, and maroon.
    
38. You Know You're a Graphic Designer When deciding on the right crop doesn't involve a choice between corn or wheat.
    
39. You've considered naming your children things like 'Kern', 'Pica', 'Bézier', and 'Serif'.
    
40. You can understand everything on this list.
    

I need to sleep. My skin looks like shit. Soon I will look like him!

Made this collage for typography class, which eh, I'm quite okay with la. Not really to my taste, but people seem to like it.





































Much prefer the original picture.

Alexander Rodchenko, a Russian Constructivist (and communist), abandoned painting in 1921 and turned to visual communication because his social views called for a sense of responsibility to society instead of personal expression.

I think that's interesting. I can't honestly say that's why I'm in design, not quite contributing to society. To adopt that stand, it would be more accurate to say that I'm contributing to the world of commerce. And that is definitely not why I'm doing design.

Why am I doing design? Good question. The only answer I can think of, which is quite shallow I suppose, is that I like and like making beautiful things. And I like organizing information in a cool way. That's it really.

Which is somewhat self-indulgent with an OCD slant.

Clearing my room of paper debris and empty rolls of various manifestations of sticky tape, I realize that there's a long, long list of things that I think art/design students would not mind receiving for birthday/Christmas presents, and very satisfyingly so if delivered in large quantities!

1. Double-sided tape in various widths
2. Masking tape
3. Stacks of art card
4. Printer cartridges
5. Pen knife blades - NT Cutter
6. Camera film - medium format, all sorts please
7. Random assortment of pattern and coloured paper
8. UHU superglue
9. Rulers, to make up for the ones I keep losing (or people keep taking. huh! huh!)
10. USB card readers to put in each bag I own so I'm never without uploading abilities, what WHAT of course I'm being excessive
    
11. Enough sharpeners and erasers so you never have to search around when you need one
12. Cutting mats that never warp!
    
13. More double-sided tape, seriously.
    

Imagine a whole magic re-stocking inventory of the above! A dream!

Mini-class photo with our Graphic Design 1 teacher, Steve Lawler. He was really great and am quite bummed that he won't be teaching us next semester. He had that nice balance between being very chill and letting you do what you want but also giving Actually Constructive critique, you know? Apparently he's quite well-known as a design professional too but whoops, I didn't really know until very late in the semester (read: last week)

As much as I am really very addicted to trawling the Interwebz well, just because, it nearly always ends up with a new addition to my list of pet peeves. Which makes me an increasingly less pleasant person, I'm sure.

So, a new category of people that I would like to say SCREW YOU to: hipsters* posing in their nerdy/geeky-chic thick, black plastic frames acting all cute, hi seriously you look stupid. Just drop the act yeah, the whole oh look at me being all ironic and interesting because you know, I look like a nerd when in fact, I am totally ultra-cool.

Pisses me off! Maybe the whole falseness of it all is part of the "irony" but dude, you don't even have prescription lenses in them and god, they look like part of a costume - what costume? A nerd costume! And I tell you, genuine nerds out there would be embarrassed for you to be somehow unfairly implicated in the frivolity of your camwhoring.

Or maybe they wouldn't be bothered, too busy trying to save the world with quantum physics and all that. But you know who's still bothered? I AM!

Shut up, you make me feel embarrassed to be wearing my glasses for fear that I be considered a comrade in your culture.

And so, to offset the load of vitriol in this post, here's a bunch of really cool pictures gathered from here and there!

*Uh yeah, I kinda realize that this would actually include some of Genuine Friends, but aiya I still love you lot. I believe this is just a phase and our friendship! and love! will withstand this..thing! :D



.

yay america!

now please don't screw up anymore!




thanks and regards,
the rest of the world.







But really now, i'm still oh-so-nervous even though its been confirmed that obama's already won the elections. i'm not going to believe it until I see it in the papers tomorrow uh huh. Because the last time, I thought it was all going swell and then Bush was re-elected, which really, was a cue for a huge WTF from the around the world. And also because it is such a difficult challenging time now for him to be president in and if he screws upin his term, I would dare say we would be in for decades of ultra-conservatism and aggression which is gah ARGH NO.

America, we are watching (politely). Just so you know. You'd be amazed at how I've found people on online forums who honestly believe that non-Americans have no business contributing their opinions with regards to American politics because supposedly we should mind our business and what would we know anyway! So, just in case anybody passing this blog feels this way, excuse me, your business is our business, you guys made it this way.

And hello, I've been seeing people getting really butthurt about the supposed wave of socialism that is now going to take place with obama as president. I'm no expert on the nuances of political idealogy but dude, what is the issue! You pay more taxes...to fund services that help the country as a whole? Maybe it's too simplified a view, but it doesn't sound like a terrible idea. It's not like you guys were not channelling more money into the petroleum industry anyway.

Should not be talking about politics with only a half hour of sleep on my charts. Alright, that is all.

#EDIT:
"Socialists mainly share the belief that capitalism unfairly concentrates power and wealth among a small segment of society that controls capital and creates an unequal society. All socialists advocate the creation of an egalitarian society, in which wealth and power are distributed more evenly, although there is considerable disagreement among socialists over how, and to what extent this could be achieved.<sup>[1]"

...again, why would people be afraid of socialism?</sup>

ON A LIGHTER NOTE!

Signs You Might Be a Hardcore Designer

1. You’ve almost rear-ended the car in front of you because you were analyzing a font on a billboard.
2. You get pissed when a free Photoshop brush you download is less than 1000px in size.
3. You’d rather study the paisley pattern on your boyfriend/girlfriend’s shirt than listen to what he/she has to say.
4. You can use keyboard shortcuts at light speed, blindfolded, but you can’t type a paragraph of text without staring at the keyboard.
5. You’ve had “Software Nightmares,” when you’ve been working way too much.
6. You consider meals interruptions.
7. You’ve learned your lesson and stopped using the word “final” in any file name when saving.
8. You clean your keyboard more often than you wash your car.
9. You’ve intentionally given up trying to explain your projects to non-designers.
10. You see CMYK and RGB like Neo sees the Matrix.
11. You’d rather organize your desktop than your sock drawer.
12. When you heard that Adobe was acquiring Macromedia, you had a Design Orgasm.
13. When you look at Album art all you see are grunge Photoshop Brushes. (Then you see the album art a couple minutes later)
14. You’ve Photoshopped out a watermark for a comp or mock-up.
15. You’ve actually $paid for a font.
16. You’ve totally slaughtered a great design concept because the client thinks he/she knows best. (everyone thinks they are a designer)
17. The amount of words you’ve written with a sharpie labeling burned discs total more than the amount of words you’ve read in novels.
18. You’ve had to explain to a client that a layered file wasn’t part of the deal.
19. You’ve kept a ragged concert ticket just so you could scan it.
20. You’ve nicknamed the OSX spinning wheel. (and not affectionately)
21. You bookmark a resource more often than you have a fun night out on the town.
22. You’ve intentionally overbid a project because you can sniff out a bad client from a mile away.
23. You can’t go to a restaurant without secretly critiquing the menu design.
24. You have an amazingly huge font collection, and an amazingly short temper.

10 out of 24, that's pretty alright ahahaha