something to add to the wishlist

Really loving these geometric animal prints over on Weekday Carnival!
These would look lovely in my studio... 

miss mobile

How cool is this colourful paper mobile? Would love one for my home studio!
Found over on As Ink Remains.

the creative process

This cartoon by Matthieu Barrère made me smile to myself. It's so easy to head straight for the internet instead of doing things properly from the start.

Found this piece of wisdom over here.

ultimate storage

How amazing is this? mini shipping containers that make the perfect desk organisers.
Found this randomly while researching the use of shipping containers as offices (for our first live project of BTech)...

These little containers come from an online store called Cool Material - definitely worth checking out the rest of their stock, especially if you live overseas and have a fat credit card.

sh*t graphic designers say

This is pretty funny!

something worth remembering

image source here

 Immaculate Heart College art department rules 

by Sister Corita Kent

1. Find a place you trust and then try trusting it for a while.
2. General duties of a student: pull everything out of your teacher, pull everything out of your fellow students.
3. General duties of a teacher: pull everything out of your students.
4. Consider everything an experiment.
5. Be self-disciplined. This means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.
6. Nothing is a mistake. There is no win and no fail. There is only make.
7. The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all the time who eventually catch on to things.
8. Don’t try to create and analyse at the same time. They’re different processes.
9. Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s lighter than you think.
10. “We’re breaking all of the rules. Even our own rules. And how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities.” - John Cage.

"Helpful hints: Always be around. Come or go to everything always. Go to classes. Read anything you can get your hands on. Look at movies carefully often. Save everything, it might come in handy later."

Very good advice, I think!

Original can be found here, and I stumbled across it via here.

weekend DIY

"Turn old building blocks into the nicest wall hooks. Simple, clever & cheap."

This is so clever, I hope there are still some old blocks lurking in the house somewhere!
Another awesome idea from Present&Correct.

desk love

So true! I love love love Present&Correct's amazing array of stationery, seriously mind-blowing.

make something, Sawyer!

Like most creative people, (I think?) I am a big list maker. Unfortunately, although this should mean that I am super organised and have tons of happily finished projects, it really means that my desk, wallet, handbag, notebook and noticeboard are filled with lists of things that seem like a great idea at the time but somehow never get done. This leads to terrible feelings of guilt and shame and that in turn leads to me running away and eating too much dark chocolate. Not good!

So here is another of my (in)famous lists, the first one of the year I think! I have been recovering from Christmas and New Year festivities for the past few days, but now I'm feeling pretty-much back-to-normal and quite bored! I am keen to do all these things and just need to make a trip to the shops to gather a few supplies. If all goes well and I've been accepted for the BTech course, I should only be going back to college at the end of January, which means that there is practically a whole month to do crafty things!

I will take pictures along the way and post them up here, hopefully ending with a picture of this same list with all the projects crossed off by the end of this holiday...

corporate identity

Some slightly nicer shots of my newly finished, full range of stationery items.
I'm very happy with them!

very distant memories

These pictures made me laugh, back in first year we had to photograph a designer or creative person in their workspace. Almost all of us just photographed each other, I don't think we were being lazy, we just didn't have time to find real designers, or something along those lines anyway! So these are some shots of me, pretending to be very productive and thoughtful, in my (old) room/studio that my friend, Leigh, took.

Funny funny...

progress/procrastination

Type stencils for the posters - it's taken about 2 hours to make these, but from the start of this project I have been determined to spend as little time in front of a screen and at the print shop as possible, so it's all going to be worth it.  Next step... handmade cd covers.

dessert, surrounded by deadlines.

lost in toner valley

These are some old printouts that didn't quite come out right, because my old inkjet printer was running low on ink, but I actually really love the way they look. They are both pictures of my boyfriend, who has been in countless photoshoots and random poses for me over the past three years of my graphic design course! Thank you Mr. S for always being a top class model, without you, so many of my projects would not be the same.

♥

bedroom studio

1. Sophie, my old friend. 2. Trusty desk light. 3. My dad's old compass that now lives on my desk; it doesn't really work too well, but it's still great to look at!

4. Real fake ceramic coffee mug, next to a pile of sketches. 5. I also love to sew, and I love the typographic detail on this thread. 6. Beautiful colourful bracelet from my love.

7. Some of the bits and pieces on my notice-board. 8. Street flowers that are now desk flowers. 9. Bookshelf of inspiration that hangs above my bed, with the pattern that I love so much and my new bag that I love even more.

10.  Another snapshot of my well-used noticeboard. 11.A typographical rule that belonged to my dad; I still use it all the time. 12. I just like the colour of this glass! 13. Brilliant roll-up pencil case.

There's no real reason for this post, I've just been procrastinating a little bit (okay, a lot) and I decided to take a few quick snapshots of my space. I think it will be pretty interesting to look back at these in a few years time...

i work because i love this shit

click here for image source

This is a little reminder for myself, and anyone else who is working or studying in the field that they are most passionate about. The next few weeks are going to be heavy, we have exactly one month until our graduate exhibition and there is so so much that needs to be done. But, as this little type sample says, I love this shit, so I'm going to keep focused and enjoy this process! The great thing is that our final projects (a design history one and a communication one) are both completely self-motivated, which means that I get to focus on the things I love doing and reading and writing about most. Some of these things include poster design, inky line drawings, cutting, pasting, painting and stamping...

This is going to be a good weekend.

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

I remember reading this before I started studying, it made me smile to myself way back then and it still has the same effect today. I couldn't find the original author, but I found this copy on this blog.

Read and enjoy!

image source: http://tatt.ly/products/tattone

You Know You’re A Graphic Designer When …

You have bags under your eyes so big you’d have to check them in at Heathrow Airport

You watch the superbowl just for the commercials

You can spot bad typography from 100 yds away

You are pro-facebook because 95% of the myspace accounts burn your retinas

You can name more than 200 fonts in under five minutes

You are completely immune to subliminal advertising

You look upon a well-designed project with either:
sympathy OR extreme jealousy

Your hand is permanently stuck in the shape of a mouse

You tell stories of exacto-knife inflicted wounds with grizzled sort of pride

You practically take caffeine intravenously

You have an appreciation for everything unique

You’ve been spending three days non-stop on a project and it still looks like shit. You find yourself overcome by Deathlust.

“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.”

“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)

“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”.

“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”

“…when you know what “kerning” is and you really, really like it.”

“… 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..”

Forget the boy-wonder and the man of steel; your heroes have names like ‘Tibor Kalman’, ‘Stefan Sagmeister’, ‘Paul Rand’, and ‘Paula Scher’.

You don’t wear black to look cool, you wear it to hide the gauche.

You have a thing for chairs. You don’t know why.

You giggle whenever you use the colors F0CCED, EFF0FF and 44DDDD

You’re in the sun and you look around for a Drop Shadow to sit under.

You give your relatives a lecture about color spaces and profiles when you email them your vacation photos.

Seeing someone use Lens Flare or Comic Sans adversely affects your blood-pressure

You maintain a grid system for your refrigerator magnets.

You organize your CD collection according to the Pantone chart.

You sit at work for eight hours straight just looking at your monitor, waiting for a spark of inspiration that doesn’t come.

You’re up ’til 5am because you came up with the best idea ever while brushing your teeth.

The hottest dream you ever had was “Trace contour… Find Edges… Pinch… Extrude… Smudge Stick… Motion Blur…. Sprayed Strokes…”

You know Lorem Ipsum by heart.

Your kid knows Lorem Ipsum by heart.

The preschool teacher complains your child won’t color inside or outside the lines – only indicate colors on a separate sheet.

Activating your entire font collection makes your computer crash

You deliberately butcher your perfectly cross browser compatible site in IE by placing a “Too Cool for IE” banner on it.

You prefer a Layer Style of 50% Opacity (or less) on your wife’s Satin.

You spend $200 on a font for your personal website because “it’s the only one where the lower-case g is just right…”

Looking at a menu make you go “hmmm, ITC Baskerville italic” rather than “mmmm, lunch!”

And when you finally order, you go for Layer Based Slices with Grain Texture…

You use words about fonts you dislike that other normal people reserve for fascist dictators and serial killers.

Apple+Z is the first thing that goes through your mind if you drop and break something.

You refer to colleagues as Strict, Transitional, Loose and the Future Unemployed.

You refer to your privates as “the Magic Wand”.

You know that rivers are more than just water.

Your best friends are all employees at the local print shop

The only people who seem to know what you do for a living are other Graphic Designers (ex: Graphic Design? What’s that? You’ll never be able to make a living being an
artist!)

Kerning and leading on your shopping list actually matters to you, and you don’t see a problem with that.

Several South American economies suffer noticeably any time you try to give up coffee, or even cut your consumption of it by half.

You know that “bleeding” doesn’t hurt.

when your significant other/ friends have threatened to never speak to you again if you point out one more font to them.

when you know the difference between fuchsia, magenta, and maroon.

If you could go back in time you wouldn’t go back to see the rise and fall of civilizations, you’d go back in time to destroy comic sans and papyrus.

You can understand everything on this list.

Something to remember for future illustrations ...

Step into our office....

I like our little studio space, we're not always in there, but when we are, things happen... usually these things involve brain activity, excessive caffeine consumption and good old fashioned hard work.

and Old Brown Sherry.

(But don't tell anyone about that!)

some inspiration on our walls

today was "wear your paper beard with pride" day

hard work makes us sleepy, but we don't mind...

mmm tasty! who doesn't love pink sausage on their chips?

and..... we're done! for today at least.