Reading break is completed. The final stretch begins.
The train was great this whole week and on Thursday I didn't listen to any music – I just focused on the sounds. When I thought about everyone looking in a mirror that morning to get ready I couldn't help but smile. It’s a shared ritual that I think we all forget we do. It's also that time of year when the sun is rising right as I'm riding the train. There’s lots of soft light spilling everywhere.
The creative director of a local agency called Foundry, Zahra Al-harazi, talked to the fourth year advertising class and I was able to sneak in (since I’m taking illustration that day). She shared her perspective of the design industry and it was great to have a female speaker come in (most of the speakers I’ve seen up until this point have been men). What really stood out was this statistic she brought up: only 3% of creative directors are women. I did a bit more research and Kathy Delaney, chief creative officer of Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness says that a lot of brilliant women “are forced to make that choice [between family and work]”. It’s unfortunate that agencies can’t strike a better work/life balance to retain those women. Their perspective couldn’t be more valuable when women control 80% of consumer spending.
The assembly line of box production was operating at peak efficiency this week. Nikki, Laura and myself cut them, scored them, folded them and glued them. Then we moved onto the sleeves which required more cutting and scoring. Nikki went out to pick up the stamp for the sleeves and came back with stories and some ink and the stamp. It worked wonders and better than I expected (white ink on black paper; I thought it might be tough).
Some extras bits:
I grabbed this paragraph about interaction design from this site. It might be a bit narrow and limiting but I liked it:
“While graphic design is meant to be observed, interaction design helps humans experience or manipulate software or interface with screen-based hardware in order to achieve specific goals – checking email, withdrawing money from an ATM, or "Liking" a webpage…”
I’ve been following Kevin Russ on Instagram for a while and he mentioned an application called avgcampro. I tried it out and I wanted to share a test image. Basically it takes multiple pictures and calculates the average picture out of them and normalizes the result so the lightest pixel become white. It’s great if you need low noise photographs that are taken in low light but I found it also has some nice experimental uses.
Averaged photo of my closet.
I’m still reading On Photography by Susan Sontag. This part that I'm quoting pokes a bunch of holes in what I was thinking about last week with Vine. Vine isn’t TV but it is a moving image.
“Photographs may be more memorable than moving images, because they are a neat slice of time, not a flow. Television is a stream of underselected images, each of which cancels its predecessor.”
Snagged this photo from the bands website. Used without permission.
The soundtrack to this past week was the album Dream Island Laughing Language by Lucky Dragons and the song Gyroscope by Boards of Canada. In both cases it’s music from a faraway land.