I want

Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary

via Good

Have a lovely Monday! It's a balmy 70 degrees right now. It actually snowed on Friday, so I think the weather is highly confused right now.

Gill

If you click this line of Verdana, it will lead you to Gill.

Hello November

What a semester! I feel like  I'm really learning what it's like to be a designer. I'm juggling three major design projects along with two studio classes. Thank god I'm taking Beer and Wine Appreciation! It's nice to have a light course in the midst of everything else.  This is one of those semesters of setbacks. There've been a lot of restarts or near restarts, but I guess that's the best way to learn.

My mind is a bit overwhelmed at all that I am learning. A lot of it is happening outside of class. I've been working  as a shop moniter, but I spend most of my time learning to use all the equipment. Last week I plasma cut steel, this week a fellow worker and I made this:

It's a cabinet to hold all the beautiful new files for the lathe. Hopefully I'll come back in a few years to find it still in use. The shop is brand new this year. It's really fun to watch it come together. I also love that I finally know how to use almost everything in there. 

It's really October?

I've spent most of tonight avoiding work and instead browsing the blogs in this article. I have no idea why, but information mapping is really fascinating to me. We're working on a massive research project right now, all about the North American food system. I have to say, I am very excited to start organizing data. Turning paragraphs and excel spreadsheets into something visual is spectacular.

Some of my favorites:

Flowing Data's banned book map

Simple Complexity's most expensive cities

Images from projects real soon, I promise.

Stalled out

This blog completely stalled out this summer, mainly due to lack of reliable internet. Living on an island greatly reduced my access to day-to-day communication. Without cable or internet, I lost myself in the calm of summer. I have emerged a little wary of the "real" world- a place where everyone moves a little faster and I am bombarded with more visual stimuli than I can truly take in. Granted, island life is not all calm, there are tourists everywhere and the occasional heated word, but for the most part everyone was content to go to the beach and just relax.

So what did I do with my free time? I managed to read a record number of books (17), all of them fiction and all of them pleasurable. A few highlights:
Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind: a great mystery set in post Civil War Barcelona.
Joe Meno's The Great Perhaps: Meno is one of my favorite authors and this novel about family dynamics lived up to my expectations.
Tanya Egan Gibson's How To Buy a Love of Reading: I finished this in less than 24 hours, just to get to the end, which I thought fit the book well. This could've been one of those books that is well written up until the last 20 pages, but managed to wrap up well.
Guillarmo Del Toro's The Strain: Another 24 hour read, I cannot wait for this to be made into a movie, the book had great pacing. Zombie vampires, a great concept.

I also managed to plow through F Scott Fitzgerald's collected works, my favorite being This Side of Paradise, his first novel. It fit my current time of life, as it focuses on the college years and the overwhelming confusion you feel.

I am back into design thinking mode. This year is focused on bringing together all the skills we've already learned. Three major projects are already in the works, along with my elective studio work. I'll be posting progress later this week.

Summer

That lovely landmass right there is where I'll be residing for the entire summer- Martha's Vineyard. I'll be working my bum off at the Black Dog and also doing some graphics work on the side. Should be a busy, but fun summer. I arrived on Thursday and now I'm getting my bearings until I start work Monday. This is quite a surreal experience, escpecially since we seem to be living right behind Munchkinland. Some of these cottages are overwhelmingly "cute." Photos of those and other sights later, when I actually remember to bring my camera with me.

Inspired

Larger image

For the past 6 months or so I've been saving any images that I've found interesting or inspiring. I decided to condense the almost 200 images into my favorites. From modern art to design to photos, I like to flip through these when I need ideas for my own projects. I usually find these on different blogs. My favorite was Dsgnwok, which seems to have shut down. I am going to start perusing Ffffound, but I'm not sure I'll like it as much.

I survived my junior year of college. A few other final projects plus some cake-making to be posted in the next few days. For the next week, I'll be sleeping in and recovering from a nasty sore throat. Then it's off on summer adventures.