Christine's Design Blog

If my mind were a wall, this is what it would look like at the moment.

Inspired by:

Also influenced by listening to the Across the Universe soundtrack while drawing.

Oh, to have a safe home for my drawings and large-ish prints! And a room that can fit that home.

I’ve just spent a solid 13 hours on today’s Make Something. But this one’s a lot more exciting than my drawing from yesterday.

A little over a year ago, my Pratt friends and I were frustrated with the typographic education we were getting. So we decided, in a very Dumbledore’s Army-esque manner, to take matters into our own hands, and try to teach ourselves as much as we could. We had a few events here and there, until this past school year hit us hard with work. So this is the revival of Type Club, in internet form.

Since some of us aren’t in the city anymore, and many of us are just too busy trying to figure this employment thing out, I thought it would be great to have an online resource where we can share information and fun tidbits with each other.

It’s not the most exciting piece of web design/Tumblr customization, but I’m quite proud of the results, having never customized on Tumblr before. Modifications were made to the Silo theme. There are still some things I’m trying to figure out, but it’s in fair working order. Some of the club members have already joined up.

Feel free to sign up for our RSS feed, or if you’re quite eager to make some typographically engaging friends online, send us an email!

Oh yes, there’s also a Twitter feed, but I’m not really sure where that’s going yet. It seemed the techie thing to do.

Making something everyday, I am aware, is far from a groundbreaking concept. From Obsessive Consumption to Daily Drop Cap, creative minds are obviously in need of constant stimulation for a plethora of reasons.

Mine? Being fresh out of school and needing to, as James Victore would say, ‘stay hard,’ as I try to find work. And making something, after all, is why I chose this business.

So commences Project Make Something, with my first sad little drawing done on the wrong kind of paper with the wrong kind of ink, but I said I’d make something, not a Renaissance masterpiece. This little scratchy drawing has a story behind it. Remember Phileas Fogg? Well, I felt it was time I really got to know the character by reading the actual book, and where I left off, Phileas Fogg was traveling via elephant with his faithful servant Passepartout, from Kholby to Allahabad in India. Apparently the railway was not yet completed at that time between the two locations, so Mr. Fogg had to improvise. Cheers!

P.S. I get nice sunlight in my room between 10 a.m. and noon, as shown in the photo. Exact hours vary between seasons. I wish it would stay sunny all day!

I’ve just popped over to check out this website I worked on last summer while interning at the Longitude, under the expertise of design partner Greg Wong. This project lasted pretty much all summer, as I worked on the logo, Powerpoint slides and the website. I don’t know if they went with the Powerpoint slides that I created, but they did not take the website suggestions (for which I don’t blame them — I had a very hard time with this project, since biomedical things I have a hard time wrapping my head around).

But I’m very excited to see my logo on their site! It’s always nice to see something real that you’ve created, doing its thing in the real world. I think Greg put it best when he said that it wasn’t the ‘sexiest’ project, but it’s still something in actual existence for my book.

Here are some early explorations:

The lab, run by Elliot Hui at UC Irvine (yay Anteaters), studies things that I clearly do not understand, but they look like this:

Anyhoo, that’s the final design. This was actually one of my first uses of Gotham, and I haven’t been able to stop since. Trying to stop now.