College Fair

I was invited to represent my career in this year's Honolulu College Fair. My first experience doing a something like this for my own business.

It wasn't bad. Seems like there were quite a few kids and parents really interested in graphic design. I certainly felt awkward answering questions like I was some major player in this field, but I did my best giving the kids my honest opinion about my experiences. I hope it helped.

I got a lot of good questions like....

"What are the biggest challenges you face as a designer?"
"Will I find opportunities for work when I come out of design school?"
"What are some of the best schools to go to if I'm interested in design?"
"Do you make good money as a designer?"

It really got me thinking about what I do and why I was in this career as well. Overall I'd say this was worth doing and I got as much out of it as the kids.

I was SOO tired though. It was a busy day even before I had gone to this event. So I hope my answers to these kids were coherent.

Print Projects

It's been a while since I was able to show work. Some of my projects are still tied up as work-in-progress so I can't really show those. But some print work has funneled through so I can at least show some of these.

Stationery system. I haven't had a chance to do a stationery set in a little while. Everyone seems to want one-offs of different items. So this was fun to do. It was still challenging in this case though because the business title could be construed in so many different ways. My client wanted something bold, but at the same time her clients would be very conservative. So we had to go back and forth a lot on this.

Rack cards. This was a fun one. I'm still trying to practice and get better at my typography skills so the fact I had a client willing to let me go for it was a rare opportunity. I ran with it. The concept here was that her current color branding represented "gems" of her personality. So I took that idea a little further by exploring different shapes with those colors...kinda like how light would shine through gems to reflect different angles and colors.

A lot of real estate or mortgage related business have logos made with the symbols of either a house or a roof top. One day someone will ask me to do a real-estate logo...god forbid I end up designing one with a roof-top. Anyway, I thought this company had a logo that suggested a shape like an arrow-head so I got inspired to do this. I figured that suggested positivity and progress...both good things to associate with mortgages and real estate.

Hey I just noticed all 3 of these projects has my client's images on them. How about that? This is pure coincidence. What's your take on that? I have some clients that don't like that at all...they say it's conceited or embarrassing to have their photos on their collateral materials. While I have other clients who say this is absolutely essential...because they're more apt to remember people they've met by the pictures on their cards then those who have just plain cards.

I have no particular preference about that...I say it works fine provided it doesn't end up cluttering the material up.

Fun in the Sun

So yesterday we spent the night attending this year's Kokua Festival. Which, by the way, we wouldn't have been able to go to if one of my best friend's wasn't reading this blog and knew that we wanted to go to. (Thanks Jenny!)

It was good! We had a blast despite a little bit of a sore okole and a crink in my back now from sitting all-day on a slight 5% slant. We had lawn seats so basically any space available to sit down was considered good. We weren't complaining.

The weather turned out nice, we found parking, the people were cool, the music was chill... just what I needed. It's been a almost a year now since I had last taken a vacation for my honeymoon.... so this felt like a mini one-day getaway.

The music itself was great. Surprisingly enough I thought Dave Matthews stole the show. He played alongside this guy called Tim Reynolds which I had never heard of before until yesterday. Where have I been? This guy was an AMAZING acoustic guitar player. Try search on YouTube for him and you'll see...

I had never been a big Dave Matthews fan until yesterday. I was very impressed.

My wife enjoyed it too. It was good finding something we both liked in common. We're opposites in many other ways. Only thing she didn't like was the group of hippies in front of us smoking the ganja. She was making all these gagging faces. I was like, "Get used to it baby... just might as well breath it in and get high along with them"

OK, this one isn't so much related to design...but hey what the heck, I think it's cool anyway. Imagine Photoshop for the music world and this is what you get -- being able to change individual notes even if it's buried within chords and full songs.

It opens up some questions though. Just as Photoshop makes you question the authenticity of any photograph these days, how often will you question just how good your favorite musician really is anymore?

I suppose if you really wanted laptop privacy and didn't have any self dignity left...the above headmit would work for you.

Now this is a pretty cool site that has new media art exhibit videos and examples. This site called WhiteVoid was sent to me by a friend. Check out under Art & Technology there are some pretty cool things demonstrated. Looks like this has been up a few years.

It really makes me jealous exhibits like these aren't often done here in Hawaii.

Round and Round

I stumbled across this little fun tidbit today while checking out Gizmodo and a couple other blogs. Apparently this little fun item was created by Pixar for NYCs Museam of Modern Art. It's called a Zoetrope...which after digging though the cobwebs of my brain I remembered is bascially a precursor to modern filmmaking where you'd have still images painted inside a cylindrical object and then you'd spin it around to simulate moving objects.

OK, who am I kidding? I looked it up in the Wikipedia.

Anyway, Pixar's version of it is pretty amazing. Check it out.

So in other news closer to home, there appears to opportunities for Lowe Studio Inc to give back soon. In a couple weeks I've been asked to hold a booth at the National Honolulu Career Fair to represent "Graphic Designers".

And then there's a possibility I might be given a chance to lecture in KCC's New Media Arts program in the Fall.

These are exciting opportunities. I'm honored to even be considered to know enough about what I do that people think I can give an opinion to others...but at the same time I'm humbled enough that there are a heck of a lot of other qualified people out there besides me. It's kinda freaking me out to be honest...it's one thing to speak for myself when I meet with a client. It's another thing to represent my whole industry!

Well, I'm getting a lot of support and encouragement by my colleagues and family. I suppose getting this kind of exposure and experience is good for me and the business. I think I'd be more concerned about whether these kids would be getting the information and teaching they need from me.

God I'm getting massive stage fright just thinking about it.........

Shooting the breeze

It's been about 2 weeks now since I've converted to the "dark side" as some of my clients have affectionately put it once I mention that I've switched to Apple.

Overall I like it. The operating system OSX Leopard is a fancy desktop with a lot of bling features that can wow you. Vista probably has some similar bling features but I'm not going to touch that OS with a 10 foot pole.

As a "switcher" I haven't found adapting to the Mac as jarring as I thought it would be. Finding and organizing files on this hasn't turned out to be as confusing as I remember it being a few Mac OSs ago. In fact, I find the Mac finder to be much more intuitive then the Windows explorer file windows.

Installation of programs are a breeze. For those friends of mine who I had to teach how to install Windows programs? I'm sorry, it's much easier on a Mac. You just drag them into a folder. Idiot proof.

Most peripherals just work. Most of my original windows keyboards, mice, external drives, Win-ipods, printers and wacom tablet work just fine with it so I haven't really had to shell out as much extra cash as I expected. Thank god because this darn laptop cost an arm and a leg.

There are some things that are weird and take some getting used to -- applications don't really "close" when you close the windows. You have to quit them separately. So by the end of the day I might have like 10 applications running and don't even know it. And then I had my old habit of clicking outside of window panes when I wanted to deselect something...now with the mac that just makes my active program disappear into the background. So the first couple days I was constantly juggling with my screens all over the place.

Not bad eh? Half a post without ranting about something?

Talk about rant. What's up with rechargeable batteries? We got them in just about every type of device these days but am I the only one that notices that they never seem to last that long before they become nothing but bricks? You have perfectly good devices with dead batteries. We got laptops, wireless phones, cellphones, cameras, ipods, etc.

There's all this talk about Nickel this, and Lithium that -- charge them up, drain them full, don't keep them cool, store them 40% capacity, yadda yadda. It's almost like my wife and I have to keep a chart "Hey don't plug that laptop in yet...drain the battery!", "The phone has one bar left....NOOOOO don't put it on the charger!", "You left it charged OVERNIGHT? What are you crazy!?"

My wife almost bricked a new ipod nano I bought her a year ago for her birthday. She literally used it ONCE on the plane ride back home and didn't bother figuring out how to charge it. And then since moving here it's been sitting in a box for months. I spent the night trying to resuscitate the poor thing because it didn't pick up any charges at first.

I find it weird how my wife can spend her entire day helping people attach and detach body parts & memorize medical terms that I can barely pronounce...but she simply doesn't know how to plug her ipod into a USB port?

I better leave it at that or I might wake up with a limb or two missing tomorrow.

Otherwise things are looking remarkably good so far this Monday...

1. I resuscitated my wife's ipod from the brink of death
2. I sell off my old computer chair just a day after posting it on Craigslist
3. My bro said he's bringing over his old acoustic guitar for me
4. I managed to swing by and grab 2 Kokua Festival tickets after a tip from my sista Jenny who said they had 100 left to sell off today

Good day! Just praying it'll stay this way.....it's not even 10am yet!