Christine's Design Blog

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.

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.

My new website design is finally up and running! There will probably be little hiccups here and there. If you run into any, please don’t be shy to let me know.

I’m so glad that doing a website was part of our Portfolio Development class. Our teacher, Dungjai Pungauthaikan, was amazing and gave valuable critiques.

I owe Ben a huge thank you for writing me the wonderful javascript that allows the design page’s images to be clickable and to fade in and out. I tried to make it as user-friendly as possible, so feedback welcome there as well.

Meanwhile, my desk is going to take a long while to make complete, but I wanted to show a preview of what is to come. The desk is my way of separating my main focus on design from my other interests. I also wanted a fun way to present the eclectic mix of categories. Plus, anyone who knows me knows that I’m obsessed with my work space and the way it’s organized.

Eventually this blog will also be updated to match my new identity. In the meanwhile, enjoy the new site, and cheers!

Was just watching a live stream of Tina Roth-Eisenberg‘s talk at Parsons as part of their AAS Graphic Design Networked Design Talk Series. She talked about her journey to where she is now. What struck me most is when she said that the best part about blogs is how personal they are. When they start to get successful and begin to add an editorial staff, she says they lose the personal touch that made them so special to begin with.

BUT my favorite part was when she mentioned Teuxdeux, which is an online app for keeping track of what you need to do.

It immediately reminded me of my teacher from last year, Lara McCormick, who had three sections labeled in her desktop background, which I think were yesterday, today, and this week or something of the sort. She would keep folders on her desktop in these spots to help her organize what she had to do, which I thought was such a brilliant idea. Of course, that’s a more physical way of organizing things, while Teuxdeux is basically an online to do list, because we all know we just lose the paper version anyway.

The password to sign up for Teuxdeux is our favorite Italian chocolate hazelnut spread.

-side note: Something went funky with my site over the weekend i.e. a monster ate my image and music files off the server (or something), but all is well now, so hurrah-

I heard of the blog Photoshop Disasters (PsD, har har) from my friend Erica, and there is much ridiculous Photoshop ugliness going on, but I cannot stop laughing out loud all alone in my room at this one:

How in the world does a Mac QuarkXpress folder get plopped onto a mailbox like that on the back cover of a DVD? And who still uses Quark? Snuffy sure looks confused.