Posts Tagged ‘projects’

Argen­tina is most def­in­itely still in holiday-mode: it’s summer vaca­tion here, a good number of the shops still have their shut­ters closed, and everyone who can afford to is off on the beaches of Uruguay. I’ve been working a lot more than I’d like to admit the last two weeks. Tech­nic­ally I still have a suntan, but I think it’s fading.

Bal­an­cing work and life has always been trouble­some for me. I tend towards work­aholi­cism on my best days, and it’s cer­tainly not uncommon for me to put in a sixty-hour work week. I’ve gotten better: I almost always take most of the weekend off now, and I’m trying as much as pos­sible to go out and about at least a little bit every day. I’ve real­ized that I’m simply not going to see as much of this con­tinent as I’d like to while I’m here.

With all the shut­ters closed, you really get to see the lovely graf­fiti that covers the build­ings here.

But I’ve got new pro­jects coming in all the time, and work is (for the most part) going well. I wish I were doing more per­sonal pro­jects, but that isn’t any­thing new. I had signed up for the Sketch­book Pro­ject some time ago, and now the deadline’s looming. I’ve given up on get­ting mine done, in part because I totally lack art sup­plies and they’re on the expensive side here, and in part because I simply lack time. I’d rather spend my free time exploring this massive city or trying to pick back up on my Spanish, which is just ter­rible. (Porteños speak the most insane ver­sion of Spanish I’ve ever heard, com­plete with its own spe­cial pro­noun and verb con­jug­a­tion, strange pro­noun­ci­ations, and some kind of crazy pig-latin. I’m totally lost.)

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I love type, but I find that most days, I don’t get much of a chance to really play with it like I like to. I miss the luxury of school (any­thing that costs more than a pair of Louboutins is a luxury), where we’d be given typo­graphy assign­ments that let us play around with let­ters and words, cre­ating inter­esting pat­terns with them.

Typo­graph­ical arrange­ment for the NSLC’s annual report. I made up this fact. They tell me that the number is totally insane.

I’ve been wanting to get back into doing things like this, mostly as cre­ative exer­cises to keep me inter­ested in design. Of course, cre­ative exer­cises in and of them­selves are also some­thing of a luxury; it seems like that pesky work keeps get­ting in the way.

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So if you’ve been any­where within a ten-mile radius of me any­time in the last week and a half, you’re prob­ably well aware of The Big Card Pro­ject. I took it upon myself to design a set of six macabre Valentines, thinking it’d be a a fun little pro­ject that’d get me away from the com­puter, make me feel more cre­ative, and force me to relax a touch.

Thumb­nail sketches. This is how things started. I hate showing people my sketch­book because things invari­ably look like they were drawn by a blind five-year-old. Basic­ally, I’m just trying to get the com­pos­i­tion right.

Of course, I forgot to factor in the fact that I’m a crazy work­aholic per­fec­tionist with an insom­niac streak a mile wide whenever I get really pas­sionate about a pro­ject. My little lark of a pro­ject kept me up late, made an utter war­zone of my apart­ment, and still took far longer than I’d anticipated.

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After all the hectic-ness and flurry of activity that was the big web­site launch, I took a whole day off for the first time in ages. I curled up with a blanket and read a good hun­dred or so pages of The Master and Mar­garita (which I highly recom­mend), then went out to a Christmas party dressed as, depending on how you see it, either a very large, very talk­ative present, or a Vegas wait­ress on Christmas.

I felt so refreshed the next day that I very nearly made it a whole weekend off work! After all, what are Sundays for if not cat­naps and hot baths, and gen­eral relax­a­tion? How­ever, my photographically-inclined room­mate was applying for a job, and her tumblr web­site was doing a ter­rible job of show­casing her skills.

So we sat down together, spent about half an hour combing through pho­to­graphs of trees, and even­tu­ally pulled together this quick-and-dirty little web­site for her. It’s using the same image-display script I use for my own site, and there are still a few kinks I’ll need to work out, but it’s a good example of what can be pulled together in an evening if you’re motiv­ated enough.

Do check out her web­site—she does some lovely work, and she’s looking to do more!

I seem to go through phases of rapid devel­op­ment, fol­lowed by periods of stasis. I just real­ized, after having worked 35 hours in the past 3 days, that I’m in a “rapid devel­op­ment” phase. Or I’m just working so much that I can’t help but pick up things faster.

Anyway, new projects!

• Word­Press theme for Jaye Wells
• menu design
• web­site for Mar­ilyn Hicks
• and I’ve updated Marilyn’s iden­tity page, finally (more…)

I’ve had the cra­ziest last-little-while: per­son­ally, pro­fes­sion­ally, oth­er­wise. I took my first vaca­tion in years and dis­ap­peared into the Mayan jungle for a week, and I’ve just recently returned from just shy of a full month spent on-the-road, living out of suit­cases and back­packs and the trunk of my car. It’s been utterly fabulous–exhausting and refreshing sim­ul­tan­eously, and just what I needed to return to my life & busi­ness with a clean brain & slate.

I have many stories and pho­to­graphs, which are forth­coming. For now, two new pro­jects: the hol­iday cards I mean to do every year, and a redesign and rear­chi­tec­turing of Fern­wood Pub­lishing.

but appar­ently I’m not. I’ve actu­ally had “update web­site” on my to-do list for the last three or four weeks. In the past week it’s actu­ally been upgraded to “update web­site PLEASE” and “for the love of EVERYTHING, UPDATE WEBSITE ALREADY”. I’m starting to sus­pect it might be easier to switch over from my custom-built Ruby on Rails powered site to a cus­tom­ized Word­Press site, which could easily handle everything my RoR is doing with a much easier-to-use backend (not that manu­ally editing data­base fields isn’t easy).

I’ve been using Word­Press for everything lately, and have totally fallen in love with it. I seem to always be a little behind the curve on web trends (as a side note, I’m now on Twitter, though I still don’t really under­stand the point entirely) due to my gen­eral dis­taste for trends (if everyone likes it, it can’t pos­sibly be any good, right?). But I really wish I’d dis­covered the power and flex­ib­ility of Word­Press earlier on—it’s bril­liant and I’m begin­ning to use it for more and more of my client projects.

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Well, it’s been a long, long, long time in the making, but I’ve finally updated my port­folio a teeny little bit (not too much to be over­whelming, of course!) There’s this por­trait of my gor­geous little sister:

and a “new” web­site (that was com­pleted months ago). I really don’t like updating my own website!

But I’m determ­ined that it’s about time to do it, espe­cially given that I’m about to move again, and that means that my address as listed on the web­site will be even more wrong than it is cur­rently. (Sure, in theory it only takes two minutes to change it, but that’s not how I work…if I’m going to spend two minutes, I’m going to be there three hours trying to fix all the little things.) At any rate, all the little things have really added up, and it’s time for some major-ish rearran­ging. (more…)

I have a ter­rible tend­ency to throw what I refer to as “all night work parties”, which usu­ally end up com­prising about two and a half days straight of me staring into my laptop, clacking away and for­get­ting to sleep or come up for air. They’re admit­tedly not the most glar­ingly healthy way of get­ting things done, but I do tend to be the sort of person who works in spurts, and when the fever comes over me, I often like to run with it. (I actu­ally exper­i­mented with a “normal” schedule, wherein I slept at least a little bit every single night for a month straight. It was inter­esting, and I may try it again at some point…but not just now.)

So a few weeks ago, I was crashing at the tail end of a work party, and ended up falling asleep next to my laptop, gigantic glass of water in hand. Yes, you know where this is headed. A few hours later, I woke up spilling said gigantic glass of water all over myself and my poor laptop. (Lovely way to wake up, might I add.) Nat­ur­ally, I pan­icked. There was much cursing and wailing (me) and sparking and crack­ling (the machine) as I tried to figure out what on earth to do. It wouldn’t turn off, and it took my sleep-addled brain a good five minutes to figure out that removing the bat­tery would do the trick. The poor thing was soaked, and ruined. I was in a sim­ilar state. That machine was, in effect, the entirety of my busi­ness assets, and the tool by which I can earn my living, and it had just crackled out and died on me. (more…)

Because I’m sure that those of you who know me well don’t hear enough of my thoughts on design. This is a ques­tion­naire I filled out in response to a freel­ance job posting. It was quite an exhaustive pro­cess, actu­ally, and I only had a short time­frame in which to com­plete it, but I gave it my best shot. (I’ve edited out the “tech­nical” por­tion and the examples & attach­ments, as that sounded a little too much like a high school test for even me to be inter­ested in it!) (more…)

So I’ve moved yet again and am just get­ting back on my feet. For anyone who may be inter­ested in sending me lovely things in the mail, my new address is as follows:

TRIGGERS & SPARKS GRAPHIC DESIGNS
6987 Vaughan Avenue, Hal­ifax NS
B3L 2M2

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…for a girl goes on and on about how “you should make sure to update your web­site on a reg­ular basis, or else!”, I’m pretty ter­rible at doing it myself. I’ve been trying to get into the blog­ging thing, but I’m having trouble motiv­ating myself to post at least once a week! For shame.

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