almost home
Three Goblin Art
macklin celebrini has autism
we're not kids anymore.
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
todays bird
dirt enthusiast
Stranger Things
oozey mess
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
shark vs the universe
d e v o n
Cosimo Galluzzi
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
Sade Olutola
Origami Around
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
ellievsbear
trying on a metaphor
One Nice Bug Per Day
seen from United States
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@allysontachiki
Addiction is an issue that is close to our hearts and has long been approached as a criminal issue. We’re hoping to change that perception by spotlighting the extremely successful harm reduction programs in New Mexico with our documentary, The Exchange.
Check out the trailer and donate to our Kickstarter if you want to see more!
Viewers will experience the Harm Reduction Program first hand while following the specialists who work to combat the spread of infectious diseases and overdose deaths.
Check out this great profile on our film from The Fix! It features an interview with our own, Layla Bozek.
Taking Character Development this quarter and drew this weird guy my first week. #workinprogress #wipwednesday #characterdevelopment
Officially done with fifth quarter. Its frightening how close the end of my time at the Circus seems to be and knowing that there is still so much to improve on.
Nevertheless, here is a project from my Motion Graphics class, which I took this past quarter. Its the first time I’ve touched After Effects since my days in undergrad. It is a whole different beast, but it is so exciting to add this skill to my arsenal.
Staying true to myself, I picked a small speech from the Tolkien universe (i.e. The Hobbit).
One Year Down
Wednesday marked the end of my first year at the Creative Circus. Its also the point where we are supposed to evaluate all the work we’ve done since first quarter. I didn’t quite get enough time to do that in panel, but even in just gathering up all that I’ve done, its pretty amazing to see all the things I created: from websites to bags to cut paper poster to full branding suites for hotels and restaurants. Things I never would have imagined myself making while I sat on set only a year ago.
I’ve learned a lot and yet, I also know I have a long way to go. Again and again, I go back to Ira Glass’ words because everything that I’ve done doesn’t ever seemed finished. It doesn’t ever have that polish that I’m looking for.
But I think that’s part of the process. And in honor of that, but also to keep myself accountable as I now embark on a year of intense portfolio building, I decided to start posting up some work from past quarters in a series I’m going to dub, Works in Progress.
So here’s my first little project. In my first Type class, we were tasked with creating a portrait of ourselves using a singular typeface. I’m proud of this piece mostly because I know what my first draft looked like and how horrifying it was compared to what I ended up, which vaguely looks like me, right?
interactive design - week 10
We’ve made it to the end of the quarter and it was really great to see everyone’s final projects and how far everyone has progressed over the course of the last ten weeks.
This has been a really great quarter to get a feel for what I’ve really gotten myself into with Interactive Design. I’ve only dipped my toes in designing for the web, mobile, even tablets, but having this experience feels reassuring and makes me want to push myself to start blending my different developing skillsets in design, coding and storytelling.
And I’ve also appreciated having to post on this blog every week for the class and I hope to continue the trend in the coming quarters with some of my works in progress. If nothing else, it will show the progression I’m making through this Circus journey!
interactive design - week 9
Things are winding up to wind down at the Circus. Interactive Design has been a really great class that has taught me a lot, but also shown me how much more I need to push myself.
It was extremely useful to get some Photoshop shortcuts down, but I think as I get more familiar with the tools and continue to design, I also have to be careful to not fall into a rut. We’re working on our final assignment and while I approached it with a completely different mindset, I realized after presenting some of my wireframes that I was playing on similar elements from my first project. I’m sure it happens with many creatives: writers fall back into familiar archetypes, designers have fonts and layouts they gravitate towards.
Designing for the web (or for anything, really) is more than just putting up big images and animations, its creating distinct experiences. And I hope to expand my horizons in the coming quarters.
interactive design - week 8
We’re nearing the end of the quarter and presenting our last few projects. So I thought I’d post this old quote from Ira Glass, host of This American Life:
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.
This is a sentiment I’ve long agreed with as I went through the struggles of producing films in school and in the subsequent years. And now entering this new phase of introducing design into my repertoire, many of the things I have produced thus far have surprised me in that I’m utilizing skills and tools I’d never had before, but also, never quite feeling like its there yet. A lot of times, I really enjoy going through the critique process because I look at my work and know its not quite there, but I don’t know where to take it so that it has that "special thing.” So I appreciate school providing a forum to push me, but I also have to know that I may be producing a lot of work before I ever feel like its “there.”
interactive design - week 7
Images! Our lecture this week covered the various formats and options for imagery in our designs. Coming from a background in film, I think its my natural inclination to always want big, cinematic, emotional imagery.
And if you looks at articles like this, its clear its a growing trend.
But aside from creating a beautiful, simple design, I’m also really excited about the web’s capabilities to take images/graphics (SVGs, maybe?) and combine them with animation to create an interactive experience like the Slavery Footprint website, which is a really engaging way of presenting important information.
Morning times. (at Westside Provisions District) picture book
interactive design - week 6
This week’s class overlapped a little with my Type 1 class. Having no background in design prior to coming to the Circus, its really great for me to be immersed in the world of type. I don’t feel like its a particular strength of mine, yet, but I’ve definitely been exposed a lot to how much it can affect the feel of a design. There’s a lot of foundries and things to explore, though at the moment my best friend for type is Google Fonts, just for its ease in incorporating into websites.
In some ways, I sort of equate type with sound work in film. With amateur projects, that’s often one of the last things people really think to spend money on, but quality sound gives film so much depth and polish. Same with type. Not paying attention to the feel of a typeface, the hierarchy of it, can completely change how people perceive your project. It can come off unfinished, confusing unreadable, if a designer doesn’t take the time to pick the right font face (which sometimes does include having to actually pay!).
interactive design - week 5
Yikes. Hard to believe its week 5.
This week found us diving into UX/UI, which in some ways, are still mystifying terms to me. I took a UX class last quarter and actually really appreciated the idea of focusing your design for the usability of the end user. I think with all the various programming languages and plug-ins and such, its easy to get caught up in the exciting interactions one can have in their pages (much like the jQuery plugins we’re learning in Web Dev 3), rather than what makes it easier for someone to simply use the site.
At the same time, after reading this article, I think one of the big things about UX is you have to be flexible with your design. For all the research you do on your target market, as intuitive as you think your interface may be, a user will always surprise you with the way they interpret the site, in much the same way that people will take away different things from art pieces or films.
interactive design - week 4
My head feels like its spinning a little with all the distinctions between various layouts/designs that once can employ for their site. Last quarter, I took Web Dev 2, which basically drilled responsive design into me. And to now go back and find there were all these predecessors (static, fluid, gel, adaptive, etc) on the way to figuring out true responsive design (which is ever-changing in itself), makes it even more complicated.
Perhaps I’m biased because I learned to code responsive before really considering the other options (though many of my early coding projects were likely along the lines of static and fluid), but it seems like with the ever growing number of screens that web content can be viewed on (phones, computers, TVs, cars, etc), it makes the most sense for a designer to pick several likely sizes and then scale up their designs to fit those screen sizes and those roughly around it.
I suppose this is the blessing and the curse of the interwebs being such a wild frontier: little to no standards. Even though I may learn one thing, there will always be artifacts of these other design standards around the web for many years to come.
interactive design - week 3
Another week in Interactive Design. We cranked out some wireframes for our food service site re-design and now we enter the sort of terrifying process of color comps.
Appropriately, we discussed color theory on the web in lecture this week. Having just gone through Sylvia’s Color Theory 1 class last quarter, there was some overlap in what we learned, but I think there’s also this new dimension to designing in color for the web. Combining this lesson with all the fun transitions and video elements we’re learning in Web Dev 3, a website (like film), is a constantly moving canvas. Videos are playing in the background, elements are popping up and you have to design for those things and how the look will change as these interactive features move and manipulate the visible frame of the screen. Color isn’t a static design element anymore.
We’ve done some design work in other web classes, but this is probably my first project where I’ll be really intensively taking these things into account. Its scary and exciting!
interactive design - week 2
This week, we presented research, user personas and sketches for a website re-design of a food service company. It was great to see the ideas coming out of my classmates, particularly those that aren’t in Interactive. I found that I have sort of been limiting myself in designing websites because I’m already thinking ahead to coding it and I need to break out of that.
But I also really appreciated the advice of the 7 +/- 2 Rule, which basically states that people can only hold around 5-9 things in their head. So, going off the research and user personas, I really need to identify key points that the design needs to be hitting. It seems like obvious advice, but I think its easy to get overwhelmed in wanting your design to be a million different things to a million different people. This helps streamline and focus the process.
interactive design
Since I officially applied to the Creative Circus, I’ve constantly been asked, “What is Interactive Design?” and in terms of my own study I’ve always explained it away as being a hybrid between design and development.
This quarter (my third at the Circus) is the first time I’ll be taking an explicit Interactive Design course. Its exciting, but also still difficult to explain exactly what I’m studying. Titles like interactive designer, graphic designer, UX designer and front end developer are, in the current marketplace, increasingly fluid, as we discussed in our first class.
While I still don’t have a concise definition, I’m also really excited about this sort interdisciplinary approach. One of the major reasons I wanted to pursue this track is that I’m interested in understanding how users consume and interact with content beyond the traditional film and television venues I had worked in before. In the next ten weeks, I’ll be posting little snippets from the class that will hopefully illuminate this a little more.
your career starts now
Over three years ago, I wrote on this blog about a terrifying decision I had made: after many, many months of struggling to find gainful employment, I was leaving the one company who had given me a chance.
In the years since, so many things have changed. And while the moment of giving notice to my two bosses, both of whom I deeply admired and enjoyed working for, is probably one of the most anxiety-ridden moments I've had in my life, I still know it was the best decision for me. I traveled the world and despite any cliches, really came back a better person for it. Rather than putting pressure on myself to constantly be making upward moves, I embraced the idea that everything that happens will fall into the haphazard path of where my life should head. Risks weren't really risks anymore. There were a lot of things I pursued and only very rare times I said no. I approached almost everything as an experience that would somehow make me better.
And that is how I found myself in Atlanta, working for nearly the past two years in reality television. As with the prior job I had back in Los Angeles, it has been a tremendous learning experience and I have no regrets in accepting the positions. But like before, I did see a need for a bit of a redirect.
On Monday, my career will start, as they told us at Orientation. I will be studying Interactive Design at the Creative Circus in Atlanta, GA. And while going back to school may seem like a complete U-turn on all my past work, I'm not throwing away any of the knowledge I learned from film school, from commercial production, from independent films, from reality TV. I hope the next two years will be me learning to channel that into creating a storytelling experience across multiple platforms that increases an audience's ability to engage and ultimately, makes the story resonate more with them.
We were told that this experience would change our lives. But unlike three years ago, such momentous change isn't as terrifying to me. I'm excited for it.
