Posts Tagged ‘zen’

In the middle of the Amazon jungle, seven hours by boat from the closest hos­pital, I cut off my fin­gertip with a machete.

This is how I spent my Christmas: I flew to Manaus, a big ugly port city on the Amazon river, where the warm, slow, black Rio Negro and the cooler, faster, sandy Rio Solimões meet up and run side-by-side for some dis­tance, looking rather neat. Manaus was not the world’s nicest intro­duc­tion to Brazil—the city echoes the sur­rounding jungle with its sprawling messi­ness. Once one of Brazil’s richest cities, it still con­tains the opu­lent (and rather tacky-looking) pastel-coloured palaces built during the rubber boom, but everything else is either a giant ugly factory or struck with urban blight.

But it’s a jumping-off point for rain­forest excur­sions, and that’s what I was there for after all. It took two flights, one taxi ride, a speed­boat, a bus through one of the most poorly-maintained roads I’ve seen yet, and another, much smaller, wooden boat to get to the jungle lodge we’d be spending a good por­tion of the next five days. Early Boxing Day morning, I was on my way to the jungle, excited for what lay ahead of me.

I’ll be honest: it wasn’t any­thing like what I expected. I was ready for a trip that would be phys­ic­ally and men­tally taxing; I got this, but not in the way I’d expected. I’d thought I’d be tired from phys­ical exer­tion, but instead I was just cold and wet. (Or, other times, hot and mosquito-bitten.) Worse yet—I was almost bored.

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So my poor tele­phone is on its last legs, and I’m finally breaking down and get­ting a shiny new iPhone, for a wide variety of reasons. (It’s pretty! It does “smart” stuff that my Stu­pid­Phone Black­berry can’t! It can play music and take photos that don’t look totally ter­rible! Designing iPhone apps will be easier if I can actu­ally see how things work!)

This prob­ably means that I’ll be forced to finally change my voice­mail mes­sage, which is faulted for fea­turing a lengthy pause between me speaking and the beep, among other things like being mumbly and unclear. Since I very rarely pick up the phone, and I never pick it up when I don’t recog­nize the number, I am thinking I’ll change the mes­sage to read: “Hi! This is Sarah. I’m not picking up because I’m busy working on your pro­ject. Send me an email instead!”

My hatred for the tele­phone, I think, is well-justified. (I sound a little like a monkey on meth while on the tele­phone as well, but that’s irrel­evant. Mostly.) While some people seem to think it’s annoying that it’s so hard to get me on the tele­phone, I have my reasons, and I’m sticking by my guns.

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In the interest of con­tinuing my forays into self-directed and hand-generated pro­jects, I’ve been taking a screen­printing class at the fant­astic Roberts Street Social Centre the past few weeks. It’s been fant­astic, and I’m so glad I took a class instead of learning it myself—while I do love teaching myself new skills, the setup would have been extensive and it may have been more dif­fi­cult to find the motiv­a­tion to “go” to class each week, whereas with a defined class time, I was forced to show up or lose my oppor­tunity. With pro­jects and to-do lists con­stantly piling up, I may oth­er­wise have aban­doned the endeavour for sleep.

The time-crunch, how­ever, meant that I needed to accept imper­fec­tions. Now, anyone who knows me knows well that I’m a tiny bit per­snickety: I’ll spend half an hour adjusting the kerning of a font until it feels just right, I’ll go back over a design that’s already been client-approved in order to “fin­esse” the whole thing, and I typ­ic­ally com­plain that Pho­toshop won’t zoom to a level any higher than 1600%.  While I really do believe that this is a valu­able tend­ency in a designer (and, in fact, I sus­pect that most graphic designers are by nature a touch anal-retentive), it’s also a major hindrance in an industry that is so intensely deadline-driven.

Fin­ished thank you cards, each one screen­printed by hand! I’m not happy with the heart design at all–the lines are sim­ul­tan­eously too thick AND too thin. I think I might prefer this redesigned with more of a skull/vine design in the bottom-right corner.

This is why often my self-driven pro­jects are fin­ished late: while client pro­jects are often do-or-die, if the client is myself, I’m often con­tent to let my expected dead­line pass me by in favour of pro­du­cing work that’s closer to “per­fect” (it’s never actu­ally per­fect, of course.) This is why it took me three months longer than expected to launch my new web­site, and why my Valentines were barely even printed and ready to go by the four­teenth. Given that it’s easy to sour on your own work after obsessing over it too long, this delay is a dan­gerous thing. Wait too long, and the whole thing ends up needing to be scrapped and started all over again!

But with the screen­printing class, I had no option (other than flak­i­ness, which I’m giving up as a life­style choice as much as pos­sible). So I showed up for my second class with a design that wasn’t per­fect, telling myself that it was just a learning pro­ject, and it didn’t matter if it wasn’t right. I’m just learning! It’s okay to screw up!

The thing I started to realize as I got into the printing pro­cess is this: everything that looks like a fatal error to me is basic­ally invis­ible to everyone else.  (Not a major rev­el­a­tion, but some­thing I ought to con­stantly keep in mind, because I never seem to remember it.) The fun­da­mental flaws in the ini­tial design weren’t nearly as glaring or as apparent to others as they were to me.

Then, as I pro­ceeded with the printing pro­cess, I real­ized that I hadn’t been as pre­cise with the first colour “plate” (the red accents) as I would have liked. (In screen­printing, each colour is printed inde­pend­ently of the others, much like a tra­di­tional CMYK plate-printing pro­cess that I learned about in school, but never actu­ally had a chance to wit­ness.) Accord­ingly, when I printed the black “plate” on top of the red, the regis­tra­tion often didn’t line up per­fectly, and there was an overlap.

Then some­thing funny happened. I could, in theory, have used an acetate sheet to register and measure the place­ment of every single print to ensure a per­fect output on every single print. I thought about it, briefly, and then threw cau­tion utterly to the wind, and just started printing willy-nilly. Prints came out with white where red should be, and red where white should be, and instead of breaking down into tears or tan­trums, I care­fully put them on the drying rack with the others. Not only was I not upset, but I actu­ally dis­covered that I rather liked these mis-fit mis-prints! Who­ever knew?

And really, where I’m so gung-ho on the hand­made pro­cess anyway, it’s about time I learned not only to accept, but to embrace my mis­takes. (Are you listening, brain? I’m talking to you.) Mis­takes are often the most inter­esting part of a piece of work, and they so often gen­erate new ideas and con­cepts that might oth­er­wise forever remain undis­covered (gravity, nylon, peni­cillin, chocolate-covered bacon). And espe­cially when some­thing is hand­made, part of its appeal lies in its imper­fec­tions: signs of the inher­ently flawed human touch. So often the aes­thetics of error (cracks in pave­ment, burned-out build­ings, rips in a sheet of paper) are more inter­esting, alive, and vibrant than the ster­ility of pixel-perfection.

Can you spot the errors? I bet I can find more than you can!

Now, if only I can apply that sort of thinking to everything else I do, I might finally be able get some sleep!

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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In the last year, I have moved three times: one in October, when I moved out of my apart­ment in Lun­en­burg to share an apart­ment with my boy­friend; once in March, when I moved all my things from my studio in Lun­en­burg into afore­men­tioned apart­ment (which started to look really, really full), and then just last week, when I moved the majority of my things into storage and the “essen­tials” (bed, clothing, stereo, printer) into the base­ment of my good friend Melissa’s house.

Moving is great, in a sense. It gives you a chance to take stock of your life and throw out the things that aren’t important any­more (many of which never were in the first place). It gives you a clean slate, an oppor­tunity to redefine your life according to your own whims. (more…)

I gave a present­a­tion to my BBC group last week, giving some tips and guidelines for how to make a web­site more effective. It’s aimed towards the non-technical person, though imple­ment­a­tion of much of the advice would likely require a designer or developer’s help. How­ever, I thought it might be a useful resource, espe­cially if you’re in the pro­cess of cre­ating a new web­site, or revamping an old one.

Do note that I’ve not been fero­ciously good at fol­lowing all of these guidelines myself—but it’s cer­tainly given me some better ideas about where I ought to be taking my web­site! (more…)

I think I really like Instapaper, when I actu­ally remember to use it. I have a tend­ency to look at some­thing long and tedious, then either book­mark it and forget about it, or print it and have my cat turn it into long-winded con­fetti. Instapaper is a really neat way of storing these “things I mean to read”, not like I need yet another form of to-do list. (My cur­rent system involves a primary hand­written list, in my note­book, which then ref­er­ences my “email to-do list”, or some­times my “rss to-do list”. Some­times one day’s list will ref­er­ence another day’s list, or a list spe­cific to a pro­ject, as in, do one item from said list, or do entirety of list.) (more…)

My job is not stress-free!

I am pretty much a con­stant bundle of stress. And while I realize your art­icle is more of an advertorial than any­thing, I still have to dis­agree. (more…)

I’m begin­ning to learn my life would be far easier if I were cap­able of just let­ting things alone already.

Instead, I redesign, I redesign, I redesign, and I’m never happy with what I’ve come up with after having spent forty hours staring at it at 400% mag­ni­fic­a­tion, trying to get divs to line up pixel-perfect.

I’m in the pro­cess of adding a little bit of explan­atory text to each entry, having finally suc­cumbed to the wiles of expos­i­tion in the “do I or don’t I?” conun­drum, and as a result, I’m adding some pieces that might have seemed a little off-kilter without proper narrative.

The winter blues have their claws firmly entrenched, and I’ve fin­ished my Doesto­evsky (which was my “beat the winter blues book”, the rationale being that Rus­sians are colder and more depressed than I am), so I’m busy trying to main­tain a feeling of productivity.

The last few months have brought about a lot of per­sonal mad­ness. Design work, as I’m dis­cov­ering, isn’t as acco­mod­ating towards mental chaos as other forms of artistic expres­sion are, thus I’ve let things stag­nate. Why don’t humans hibernate in the winter? Nothing would make me hap­pier than eating a lot and sleeping through the bliz­zards, ice rain, and cold winds that give me con­stant headaches.

My Grande Olde New Years’ Res­ol­u­tion is to spend less time organ­izing the 4829 songs on my hard drive and more time doing actual design work. (more…)