The last couple of weeks I have been to an abundance of live shows. This is somewhat rare since up until this point during the time I have been in Atlanta I think I have only been to one show, which was Coldplay last summer. It's not that I don't want to go to concerts it just never seems to fit in my schedule or work out.
Anyways, in the past month I have seen Yeasayer at the Masquerade, Owl City at the Tabernacle, Phoenix at the Tabernacle, Ben Harper at Verizon up in Alpharetta, Eli Young Band at a corny country bar called Cowboys in Kennesaw and Zac Brown Band back up in Alpharetta.
Yeasayer at Masquerade
Phoenix Show at the Tabernacle
Owl City at the Tabernacle
Guster (who started for Ben Harper)
Eli Young Band
Me, Emily and Kevin with the Eli Young Band
I'd have to say my favorite show was Phoenix. We bought our tickets way back in January so there was a lot of anticipation and expectations surrounding the show. The Tabernacle is an incredible venue and any show would be fun there. No assigned seats and a small venue makes for an amazing experience. It's an old church that was converted into a concert space. Phoenix puts on a pretty fantastic show; I saw them in October at ACL in front of thousands of people and seeing them closer up was pretty awesome. There have also been rumors that they could be back for ACL 2010, so I might possibly be able to see them a 3rd time. Fingers crossed! The lineup comes out on Tuesday!
I have to mention that Eli Young Band was pretty fun as well. I went with two of my friends who also went to University of Texas and the show was held at this super cheesy country western bar called Cowboys. Pretty much exactly what you'd expect: big wooden dance floor, smoky air, a big disco ball, hilarious people watching. Anyways, Eli Young Band is pretty huge back in Texas but they aren't as well known here in Georgia. Luckily that meant that the show was for a relatively small audience and we got to watch almost immediately in front of the stage. There was 1 row of people between us and the band. They put on a great performance and afterwards we went and talked to the band, comparing Texas stories and such. haha since they are from Texas as well. They were super nice and even agreed to take a few pictures with us. Needless to say, Emily and I were pretty star-struck, even if unnecessarily. haha
Every summer since I was a baby, my parents and I have gone to the Alabama/Florida coast for a week for vacation. More specifically we have gone to the Gulf Shores/Fort Morgan area which is in Alabama right near the Alabama/Florida border. We used to stay in different condos but as I've gotten older we've started renting houses and bringing our dog Ollie with us.
However, this summer may entail a slight change in plans. Since I have 2 weeks break in the summer my parents planned our week vacation to be the first week of my break which is mid June. But, unfortunately, the horrible oil spill near Louisiana has created an obstacle in our beach plans. Our week at the beach is set for about a month away and status in the gulf is still so vague and unknown. Because Fort Morgan is in a pretty bad location in regards to the spill, my mom has decided to move our destination 200 miles further east from Ft. Morgan.
Soooo, this year we are going to a different place than the place we have been going for about the last 20 summers of my life! Should be an interesting change. I'm completely heartsick over all of the potential damage and ramifications that could be caused by this spill. That area of the country has always been so important to me since i've been going there for so long. I'm crossing my fingers that some kind of solution is discovered soon. I don't want to see all of those gorgeous beaches ruined.
Anyways, instead of Fort Morgan we are now going to St. Joe Beach, Florida. It is a couple hours further drive for my parents coming from Texas, but the house we got is directly on the water and looks gorgeous:
First week of my break I'll be flying down to meet my parents in Pensacola and then driving the rest of the way to the house with them. I'll be there the entire week and then back to Atlanta for a few days.
July 1 I will be heading to NYC! A friend of mine from back when I worked at Camp Olympia, Emily, is going with me to NYC to visit one of our other camp friends who is living and going to grad school in the city. We are spending 4 nights with her including July 4th so I am pretty excited. I haven't been to NYC since I was in college and back then when I went it was super cold so I can't wait to be there during the summer season.
Gosh, I just looked at this and realized I haven't made a post since January. Which is pretty horrible since I've had a lot going on and wish I had been keeping track of everything I'm working on. The last post was written at the beginning of my 5th quarter and I am now just over halfway through my 6th.
Last quarter was a pretty crazy ride. Design History continued to wreck my brain throughout the entire 11 weeks until the day of my critique. Designing that chair was pretty consuming, considering i rewrote my concept about a million times. I designed 3 wine bottles that ended up being made in NYC and sent to me before my critique. My book projects for design history and type 4 ended up turning out just how i liked them. And I almost went crazy building a teeny tiny model of my retail space for retail branding. Once I get some of my work shot I'll be sure to post pictures on here.
found this image on someone's Tumblr. Seems to be a pretty accurate assessment on Texan's views of the rest of the country.
I've been contemplating moving my blog over to Tumblr. Seems like a pretty smooth and easy interface and I could make posts easily from my iPhone. A lot of people I know have been making the leap so we'll see if I can figure out how to transfer all of my old posts.
anyways, this quarter I am in 5 classes. Message and Content, Event Branding, Bookmaking, Annual Reports and Fragrance Branding.
In Message and Content we are creating a guerilla marketing campaign, a map or infographic about something in our lives and a triptic poster series based on something from an issue of Good magazine. This is the 4th class I have taken with the instructor of this class so I am pretty used to her teaching style. Right now I am just trying to figure out and nail down my concepts and executions. For my mapping project I am considering doing a map of all of my jewelry so we'll see how that pans out.
Event Branding is a class taught by one of the designers from AIGA. He usually teaches environmental design but he is taking a quarter off to do the branding for Design Week which will be in October. All of the design discipline associations in Atlanta are coming together to create a week of design-centered activities for members of the different associations so they can get to know each other and hopefully collaborate in the future. Our class is doing all the branding for the event: logos, colors, website, templates etc etc
Bookmaking is basically just a workshop but we spend wednesday afternoons learning different bookmaking techniques. Although tedious crafting skills are always quite frustrating to me (i.e. ENFP personality type haha) I actually really enjoy it. So far we've made 3 different types and we're starting on a third. only bummer is that someone at school threw away pieces we'd made for our books and left underneath bricks downstairs.
Annual Reports is another class I am taking with Hank who taught Design History. We're designing an entire annual report for a company we were assigned. I'm pretty excited about this project and probably will dedicate an entire post to the project soon
Fragrance Branding! In fragrance branding we are creating our own unique fragrance brand and scent and designing everything for it: Bottle, packaging, ads, logo etc etc. This class is on Friday mornings and considering the subject matter is an all girls class. It's a lot of fun to design something 3-dimensional and to see all of the creative concepts everyone has come up with. hopefully all of us will have our actual bottles produced by the end of the quarter
anyways, that's it for classes. We're in the swing of things and everything is starting to come together so should be a successful quarter. can't believe I'm getting so close to the end!
So I've been slacking pretty bad on updating the blog. Most of my previous posts have been videos i have found that I quickly post. Over my break, I tried to give myself a pretty sufficient break from computers, so I didn't make any posts. However, now that I am currently in the throws of the 3rd week of my 5th quarter, I don't see many frequent posts in the future. But, I am really excited about my new classes, even though I probably won't see the inkling of a social life or the light of day in the coming weeks.
Most of my classes this quarter require a lot of personal stories and input in order to create the concepts for our projects. For example, in my Type 4 class, we are creating a book that weaves 3 pieces of text along with images to create a narrative on an assigned sense. The majority of the text comes from the book A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman. My assigned sense is sight. Anyways, one of the 3 texts included in our book has to be personally written by us and composed of thoughts we have made about our sense in a 'sense' journal that we are keeping this quarter.
Another class I am taking this quarter is the infamous 'Chair Class' of Portfolio Center, taught by none other than the president of the school, Hank Richardson. The class is about design history but our biggest deliverable of the quarter will be a chair that we design and actually have produced. The concept of the chair must be based on an assigned design style era as well as a personal story of our own. I feel like I can't do a description of this class justice so I am going to include an article written on the class:
It's 5:30 a.m. and already the big table downstairs at PC is littered with wadded up napkins, Styrofoam coffee cups, and Krispy Kreme donut crumbs. Oh, and stacks and stacks of books—everything from modernism to McLuhan. Sitting around--and on--the table, eight or nine students with wicked cases of bed head discuss the periods that shaped the shifting currents and concepts of our modern world--weighty subject matter that sometimes even leads to a debate in these wee hours (Okay, it might actually lead to a full-blown argument; they're still a little cranky).
This is Hank Richardson's History of Design, a rite of passage at Portfolio Center, a trial by fire concocted by a man who believes sleep is for babies, the infirm, and old folks. These classes often last until well after noon. Sometimes they're held on Sundays. Such conditions—even these minor upsets to the students' sense of order--make for conflict, and Hank knows that conflict gives birth to creativity. He aims to put these guys and gals off balance, test their sense of reality, and, at the end of the day, change their reality altogether.
This is how he primes them to use the lessons design history provides. Hank likes to quote the late designer Dan Friedman, "It is important to find comfort in the past only so long as it might expand insight into the future," a viewpoint that jibes with Hank's own conviction that neophyte designers should explore the relationship of design history and design criticism primarily as a catalyst for new ideas.
Students learn that each overlapping period, or 'graphic style', is in essence a narrative, a story of history, representing a specific characteristic of attitudes and taste. These periods exemplify a 'philosophy of lives' occurring during a time of a disorderly, often tumultuous twentieth century. Portfolio Center students come to understand that the modern student's reinterpretation must reaffirm the truth that design is culture.
The deliverable products in this class are beside the point, though exquisite chairs are most often the end result. Because Hank knows that a true work of art comes from the exploration of—again—conflict, he urges students to discover that conflict within their own personal, powerful stories, which means that the work is distinctive, driven by their unique experiences, and expressed in each one's particular voice.
A former student of Portfolio Center, Dave Werner, has a video about his chair on his website. First of all, his web site is incredible and everyone should check it out here
Today, a former PC student and current employee of Wolff Olins, Todd Simmons, spoke at school during our weekly seminar. The branding firm, based in NYC, London and Dubai has a pretty impressive list of clients. The work shown today was really incredible and it was interesting to hear about the firm's personal strategies and approaches to branding and design. Some of their clients include :
Wolff Olins is a brand business. From London, New York and Dubai, we work strategically with ambitious organizations around the world. We help them not to predict the future, but to invent it. Not to make small improvements, but fundamental change. We help them to focus, to grow, to perform better, and to connect with customers.
To take three examples, we helped GE become customer-centric. We helped Tate to change the way people see art. And we helped Tata to become a world brand.
We’re 140 people, ambitious for clients, and optimistic for the world.
It wasnt long before Todd broached the topic of the 2012 London Olympic Games logo, which has received a plethora of media coverage, mostly from people who strongly dislike the logo. The logo was created by the London office of Wolf Olins, and some of the feedback from the public is quite hilarious. Todd showed one video of Jon Stewart's reaction on The Daily Show:
Pretty entertaining. I've been looking up other blogs/articles written on the logo and its an interesting read to say the least. Todd explained that they wanted a logo that didn't specifically speak to the city of London, but their strategy apparently backfired. On the bright-side, even though the publicity was negative, it was publicity nonetheless.
No. 1 Alabama is coming off a 19-point defeat of unbeaten, formerly top-ranked Florida. The Crimson Tide swept the six computer ratings that participate in the BCS. They received 54 of 59 first-place votes from the coaches' poll used by the BCS, and 58 of 60 first-place votes in the Associated Press poll.
No. 2 Texas needed a clock mulligan to beat Nebraska in the Game That Offense Forgot. When Hunter Lawrence's 46-yard field goal slipped inside the left upright, Orangebloods across America let out their breath in unison: One Sigh Fits All.
All of which means the Longhorns have the Crimson Tide right where they want them.
This will be the fifth time in 50 seasons that Alabama and Texas have played in a bowl game. In the previous four, the Longhorns came in as the lower-ranked team. Texas earned three victories and a tie. In fact, since the teams first met in 1902 -- around the time that Alabama became associated with crimson and one year before a sportswriter referred to Texas as the Longhorns -- Alabama is 0-7-1 against Texas.
The unveiling of the BCS pairings promises a revival of that 2004 comedy smash, "Three's A Crowd." Cincinnati is playing the role that Auburn made so memorable -- the cuckolded suitor. The Bearcats, No. 4 TCU and No. 6 Boise State may snipe about the injustice of being left out of the BCS Championship Game. And they have a case.
The problem is not new. The BCS Championship Game has only two sidelines. And the teams that will fill them bring not only well-coached talent but history and tradition. Texas will try to win its fifth national championship since the wire-service polls began in 1936. If the Longhorns win, they will still be one title shy of the Crimson Tide.
The coaches are equals. Mack Brown has won at least 10 games for nine consecutive seasons. After Texas slumped its way through the 1990s, Brown came in and restored the Longhorns to greatness. The burnishing has worked both ways. When Brown arrived from North Carolina, he came as a coach who could win but not win it all. No one says that any longer.
AP Photo/Harry CabluckWill Muschamp won a BCS title at LSU serving as Nick Saban's defensive coordinator. He'll try to do it again, this time with Mack Brown and Texas.
Nick Saban looks to become the first coach in the modern era to win national championships at two different schools. After Alabama slumped its way through this decade, Saban arrived and over the last two seasons has restored the Crimson Tide to greatness. After going 6-6 in the 2007 regular season, Saban's first year, Alabama has gone 25-2.
The defenses are equals, and not just statistically. Texas defensive coordinator Will Muschamp held that job under Saban at LSU when the Tigers won the 2003 BCS title. He and Alabama defensive coordinator Kirby Smart worked together on the LSU staff the following year.
The Longhorns and the Crimson Tide rank 1-2 in rushing defense. Alabama is second and Texas third in total defense. Both defenses are ballhawks -- the Tide are plus-16 in turnovers, the Longhorns are plus-12.
Surely the rest of college football would like to see Texas win and deny the Southeastern Conference the bragging rights that would come with an unprecedented fourth consecutive national championship. That would also be five in seven years.
Alabama last played in a January game in the Rose Bowl 64 seasons ago. Before the Big Ten and Pacific-10 made the game their own, the Crimson Tide played in the Rose Bowl six times in 21 years. But the last team to win a national championship in the Arroyo Seco wore burnt orange four years ago.
Both Alabama and Texas, it appears, will be at home.
A couple of weeks ago, a friend sent me a new blog to read. As I've mentioned before, I love finding new blogs to follow, and travel blogs are by far my favorite. This blog is called World School and it is a personal travel log of a family of 5 (a single mom from Dallas and her 4 children, all under the age of 15) who are taking a year-long journey around the world. They left their home in July of this year, and they are visiting 34 countries on a trip that will take 365 days. Their goal is to see schools all over the globe and to learn about cultures other than their own. Check out their blog here
The family recently featured in the December issue of Conde Nast Traveler:
The piece detailed Glowczewska's once-in-a-lifetime, ten-minute, $4,250 venture into Egypt's Nefertari Tomb, normally closed to the public but opened to her and her family thanks to the contacts and pull of travel specialist Jim Berkeley of Destinations & Adventures International in Beverly Hills, California. Sandford found herself bewitched. One day, she vowed to her children, they'd visit Nefertari themselves.
But Glowczewska's trip got Sandford thinking about travel in general—its purpose, its possibilities, its potential to teach like no school ever could. "I wanted the kids to step through the looking glass to see history firsthand," Sandford says, "all while realizing how much is beyond our borders." And so, two years later—with dreams of Egypt still in her head—the single mom devised a yearlong journey that would introduce her clan [Josh, 10; Becca, 13; Emma, 8; Sue; and Mc-Kenna, 14] to arts and languages around the globe while affording them a perspective hard to find in a classroom. She dubbed her project World School, its motto "You can't have a narrow mind and a thick passport."
Post Secret is probably one of my all-time favorite blogs; has been ever since a friend told me about it about a year ago. If you haven't heard of it, it's a project started a few years ago where the creators asked people to write their secrets on the backs of postcards and send them in to be collected. Every Sunday the blog posts 20 new secrets that were submitted. Since the project began, Post Secret has also published several books of secrets. They just had a new book come out and posted this promotional video on their site.
