and so it is done...

12:40 am.

I'm sitting on a balance ball. My laptop precariously resting on my outstretched leg. Dog next to me, snoring.

Just finished cutting and folding then gathering my semester's work. Something masochistic in me doesn't want to go to sleep just yet. How can I sleep? It's not 2, 3, or 5 am.

This class has been challenging, enjoyable, stressful, sleep-depriving, educational, encouraging, fun. Everyone added something to the experience. See you all around campus.

Why do some people decide to start line/queue right in the obvious flow of foot traffic? Say you go in to a Sbucks and there's only one person in line, ordering at the cash register. You have the choice -- stand right behind the person and cut off foot traffic or stand alongside the pastry case. Why do some people choose the first option? Even when I'm dead tired, I still think 'where do I stand to make sure people can still get through?'

These are the things that drive me crazy. Don't be oblivious!

flash assignment

For fear of not having enough blog entries, i'm posting the link to my flash project. I sent the link to some friends and family who haven't seen me lately because of this class. My dad is not known for being a gushing parent by any means so I accept the smallest of victories. His response was too funny:

Hi Stace:

How much of this are you responsible for? Did you do all the animation and the “balloon” text from scratch? It’s very creative!!!!

It looks good on the screen. Does the music change tempo on purpose? Is that to reflect the spud’s mood?

May I forward this to people?

Dad

I told him he was welcome to send it to anyone but that he might be suffering a bit from the overly proud parent syndrome. Can you imagine? "Look at what my 36 year old daughter did. I'm so proud of her." Oh, that's a laugh.

take infinity +1

ok, i haven't been through that many revisions on paper. my head has tumbled through tons of ideas. this is the winner. I'm not yet done and will be changing things around a bit. Still need to determine if the top page will be the title page or just a cover with the cut out to the title page. (By the way, Michael's didn't have any corrugated paper but I did buy a crimper. Now I don't need it.) Right now my flowers keep showing up on the left side of a page and I want to change that. I decided to add a third color, pink, to avoid monotony of brown and blue, brown and blue, repeat, repeat... These are the first few pages. Hopefully tonight I'll finish it.

And for some reason, the blue got converted to a green in some of the jpgs. The colors are the brown, blue, cream, and pink. No idea what happened with pages 2 and 3. Text is missing and colors are wrong. Not worrying about here -- they're correct in InDesign.

surely i'm not alone...

i need to redo my process design. AGH! this is the last project and still i cannot get over the lack of time allowed for refinement.

after saturday's class i tackled the dotted line thing. I wanted to have a dainty, dotted line leading through the whole booklet. got that under control now -- thanks to mark, casey, and marianna for their guidance and especially to chris for the "just stroke it" advice.

then i moved on to thinkin about images. images? i had thought about images and came to the conclusion that i'd be masochistic to try with this project. take two and i got to thinking about old b&w photos. lots of searching later and found some on istock but not enough variety. i

the photos left me uninspired. maybe the time spent looking at them killed their allure.

then thought if i go retro with photos from the 40s and 50s, i need to go all out. different design elements. the gerbera daisies wouldn't cut it. found a cute background. i was thinking of how to use the B&W photos with this type of theme but still I wasn't really inspired so I went off searching for illustrations.

more searching and I found some to go with the style. mixing and matching, i should be able to put together something cohesive. the illustrations aren't smack you in the face retro. so i think i can take a couple of these illustrations and make a few scenes - graduation, marriage, baby, and one more.

i need to throw together a rough with comps to send off to allison for her input. feel free to put in your 2 cents.

and somehow during this i need to figure out when to do laundry, take the dog for a bath, and pack for two back-to-back trips. at least i'm not planning a wedding! ;)

collections

Here are some more coffee mugs from my so-called collection, including the blue scroll one I took from a lost & found (far left). I'm a sucker for vintage look, even if it's fake. Also love it when mugs are painted inside. About half of my mugs are painted inside.

This comes from Edinburgh, Scotland. I don't use it, but I'll never get rid of it.

Another Starbucks creation. Hard to tell but the rim is silver.

right up my alley

On iedesign.com's mailing list.

They sent this fantastic but almost useless calendar out for '08. Each month is designed by a different person but uses the same color palette. I just went to their website and happily saw they made some designs available for wallpaper.

Happy sigh...

stacey, meet sleep. sleep, this is stacey

my body forced me into a mini-hiatus this weekend. it determined it needed some sort of love after the 5 am bedtime saturday morning.

i took 2 naps over the weekend. mega-naps. 90 minute naps. they felt so good.

sunday morning i laid down an edict for that evening's entertainment. no baseball. no basketball. we must watch a movie. we watched into the wild. we talked about the book in class a couple of weeks ago. it's been about 8 years since i read the book but i am fairly certain the movie makers took some interesting liberties. i don't recommend the movie, especially if you've read the book.

the only good thing about it is i was able to watch it while also fine tuning my flash project.

we were supposed to get some sort of seafood this weekend but that didn't happen and now i'm really hankerin' for some steamed shrimp.

btw, hankerin is one of my favorite words and it always makes me think of the cheese commercial...when your ten gallon hat is feeling five gallons flat, you hanker for a hunka cheese. something like that. i can see the cheese piece with the cowboy hat. random memories