life’s not a paragraph

boston does america’s birthday right. i guess the idea of “the united states” did kind of start here, so it’s only right that we celebrate it in a big way. this year was only the second time i’ve ever come down to boston to watch the fireworks. my friend meghan from home is a huge fireworks fan so i came down with her and a few other people a couple of years ago, but this was my first time living in the city and experiencing the fourth from sunrise to sunset.

and i really did. i had to work at 6:30 so i was up with the sun and i stayed out long after the sun had gone. after my busy work morning (lots of people wanted coffee yesterday!) my roommates and i packed up a picnic and headed across the charles to the cambridge side to layout on the grass. we started out with just a few people but then we grew to a group of 10-12 as friends and friends-of-friends joined us. it was the perfect day to sit in the shade and enjoy the breeze coming off the water, talking and eating obscene amounts of watermelon and guacamole (not together obviously).

the fireworks were incredible. they did an amazing job! fireworks by katy perry was slipped in there perfectly. we actually managed to get a pretty great spot so we could see everything right between the tree tops. then we walked back with the masses of people across the bridge to walk home. boston is such a beautiful city at night. the skyline and the reflection in the water is just so breathtaking, especially on such a warm clear night like last night. i loved walking home with thousands of people, blocking traffic on mass ave. i am so glad i got the chance to experience it.

so it turns out, summer classes are hard.
well i knew they were going to be difficult. there is no way to condense a semester into six weeks without making it a bit more intense. however, my book-and-article-a-week spanish class far surpassed my wildest dreams of difficulty. i made it through alive though, and with relatively decent grades. i am still taking two courses, web design and a directed study in printmaking- but i am having a much more fun time! it all has finally made me appreciate my major. i would rather write xhtml code than write another twelve page paper ever again, and it’s great to know that i probably won’t have to! WOHOO! (hopefully i didn’t just jinx myself)

now i am content with working, taking my two new england shool of art and design classes and exploring the city in my sparse free time. i had my (21st!) birthday a month ago today (again woohoo!) which opens up a whole new world for me in boston. i have a list about a mile long of bars and places to try out. but i have been meaning for a while to get to the new chihuly exhibit at the mfa and i know there is always some cool stuff going on in cambridge…. exploring. i need to explore. my summer is halfway over already, but that means i still have 2 months left to find all the great stuff that boston has to offer. ill keep ya posted with what i find!

so maybe i underestimated how intense summer classes are… just a little bit. opps. i have a lot more work than i expected, but the only thing that’s getting me through it is the idea that because of these classes i will be able to graduate on time. by the end of the summer i will have completed my spanish minor, finished all my general education requirements and get caught up in all my studio courses. i mean, that’s a pretty accomplished summer if you ask me. plus, i’ll be saving money because i won’t have time to go out and spend it! hahaha (this is me trying to be optimistic)

it’s not all bad. i’ve had time to see my friend rachel who i haven’t seen all semester because she’s been abroad. my sister’s prom was on friday, so i got to go home to do her hair and makeup and take photos of her with her date. i’ve been able to open the windows and enjoy the summer heat. homework has given me an excuse to spend more than my fair share of time at my favorite coffee shop, espresso royale, which i really don’t need an excuse to do anyway.

this weekend i am doing a roommate swap. martine is moving out 🙁 because her new lease starts in june and my friend sarah (i’ve known her since high school and she goes to bu) is moving in 🙂 i’ll see martine all the time anyway because of work and she’ll probably sleepover a lot anyway. hahaha

this is my first summer in the city. i’m staying in boston for the summer working and studying my summer away. i’m taking a total of four summer classes (trust me, i groaned in agony as i wrote that sentence) and working at a coffee shop. it’s going to be very different from every summer that i have had since i started college. the past few years i have gone home and worked as a lifeguard at my town’s beach. so this summer i am not only going to be in a different place but also i am not going to get the great tan that i usually do. 🙁 i am going to enjoy not having to wear a bathing suit everyday to work, but i am going to miss all that time i got to spend outside.

i am looking forward to staying in boston though. my friend sarah is moving in to my apartment, martine is working with me at the coffee shop, and i get all the fun of city life in the summer. the warm nights, the lights and, when i turn 21 in a few weeks, the night life! no matter how busy i am, i am still going to have more free time than i would during the school year. i can’t wait to tell y’all about it!

since these two classes are specifically design classes, i am going to sum them up in one post (i don’t want to bore you!)

contemporary art was by far the best art history class i have ever had. (shout out to prof cramer! he’s great!) i learned so much in that class that really helped me not only in my design work but also in my life (i have a great concept of existentialism now). like many other at history classes, i honestly never dreaded going to class because i knew that i was going to learn something incredible that day. it’s mind boggling actually how much art is connected to the world, and even though most people go through their lives feeling little to no personal connection to the subject, they have no clue how much it impacts them and how art changes things. there were so many instances in this class when i was blown away by the ideas and the creations of these artists (whether well-known or just well-known in art circles). so much innovation. and whether it lasted or faded, the ideas were there. somebody thought of it at one point and therefore, it made an impact. and sure, i am going to forget dates and names (i already have lost some… opps!) but the ideas will stick with me. the concepts behind these great paintings/sculptures/murals/objects will forever be stuck in my head.

SPAN 301 or latin american history was not a walk in the park. oh man, this class was not easy. i’ve always loved history, so the subject matter of this class was rally fascinating. but it was one of those classes that goes from prehistory to today, which obviously means a ridiculous amount of work. as a requirement, i couldn’t really get out of taking it. now that it’s over, i am glad that i took it. i learned a lot, especially since i knew very little about latin america’s history to begin with and it definitely made me want to learn more. it’s a necessary basis for understanding where the hispanic world is today, because without knowing their history, you can’t understand their perspective. but boy, oh, boy, am i glad that i managed to get through that class alive. hahaha

computer typography should really be called advanced typography because we do a lot more than just working with type on the computers. i think i actually hand-rendered more type in this class than i did in basic typography.
my type stills definitely improved in this course. i am much better at working with type. i’ve even gotten pretty good at recognizing typefaces! this is the class that i had the most projects in, but they were all so diverse and so much fun!

we designed expressive posters (both computer done and hand made), beverage packaging, magazine layouts, japanese glyphs and so much more. by far my favorite projects involved hand rendering. i love drawing and creating letters is so much like creating forms and shapes (well- in reality that’s what it is. a letter is really just a series of lines or shapes). i have so much fun doing it because there are no limits! typefaces have predetermined sizes/heights/widths and you can only do so much to change that without altering the typeface itself. by hand… well, the sky’s the limit. even just creating the same letter with different materials (pen, paint, ink, etc) can create such a different effect.

for our last project we were able to do anything we wanted that included experimenting with type. i decided (after a lot of indecisive sketches) to create three large letters of characters we don’t use in the english language and then create the shapes using words that have that character. i know that’s kind of hard to visualize, but i love the way it came out. i used a eñe for spanish, a ç for french/portuguese/catalan and an ezsett β for german. i am planning on framing them and hanging them up in my new apartment because i love them that much!!

my other class with annemary was advanced computer applications. now i am sure that i have talked about this class before. we did a semester long project which centered around a character that we created. they could be from any time in history. our job was to create our persona, “curate” artifacts from their life into a faux museum exhibit and ultimately design a companion booklet that would tell our person’s story and show off all the work we did over the semester.

i chose the lowell textile mills during the 1840’s. i’d always been sort of fascinated by the industrial revolution in america and the role of women and children. since i live not too far from lowell and since i’ve actually been there (although that was sixth grade), i decided to create a women who, while working at the mills, played a role in the first protests for fair wages and fair hours.
it was really interesting for me to learn about all these women who were breaking all these stereotypes and at the same time, campaigning for political reform almost 100 years before they even had the right to vote. the idea that women, who were considered inferior to men, were the basis of the industrial system which we based capitalism on. and i found it interesting how little recognition they are given.

i really enjoyed this project because it allowed me to be hands-on (staining and hand aging photos and documents) and design-y. i really got to be so creative; which its always a little overwhelming to have such an open project, but once i got started i got really into it. you should have seen me and marissa at staples waiting to get our final books printed. you would’ve thought we were waiting to take our first child home or something. i really got to expand my horizons, and even though elements of it were more successful than others, i’ve now had experience doing many different things so i can move on and improve.

one of my two classes with my favorite professor, annemary, i think i  got some of my best projects out of gd2. i know i have some previous posts about the projects in this class, but i am going to go over each one generally so you can get an idea of the assignment and my own interpretation of it.

we did three major projects in this class. the first one was the non-profit event invitational. we had to chose a non-profit, take and existing event/create an event and then make a sustainably designed invitation to that event. we had to know all the details: when, where, who was the target group, how we were sending it, how they were responding, etc

i chose the FEED Foundation immediately. i had already known a considerable amount about the organization and its ties to the world food programme so i knew it was the perfect non-profit for me. but then i had a very hard time choosing what event i was going to do. i went back and forth and back and forth, thinking of idea after idea that just didn’t seem right. i even had an event brainstorming session with my friend marissa who was in my class. i finally (with a lot of help from everyone else) developed the idea of a movie premiere. i got in contact with the foundation and got some logos and photos. then i created a self-mailer that would act as an informational poster on one side and a movie poster on the other to announce the premiere. my ideal target audience would be college students, like myself, that wanted to learn more about the issues of hunger and poverty. i am really proud of the final product.

our ext project was to work with keep a child alive, alicia keys’ non-profit which works with HIV/AIDS victims in africa and india. annemary had worked with them last year to design the shirts for their team in the new york AIDS walk in may. they loved working with her class so much that they wanted to do it again! it was awesome to do this project because we got to have client skype sessions and got to have a little taste of what it was like to work and design for a real client. the t-shirts that everyone designed were so incredible, i am glad that i didn’t have to choose. my shirt ended up getting second place (yay!) but saige’s shirt was the one that actually was getting printed and sold in the kca store! i don’t think the shirt is on there yet, but keep an eye out for it, especially in the pictures from the AIDS walk in new york this past week.

our last project was to do a personal catalog. we could make it about anything we wanted. i decided to go a little conceptual (which proved to be more challenging but worth it). my ten items were ten little things that make me happy– like jumping into a pool or the foam at the end of a latte. it was really fun to take all of the photos and then create the narratives to go along with each item. i made my second-ever book cover with book board and after a failed attempt, it worked out great!

overall, this class really helped me push myself. if you had told me i’d be making books at the beginning of this semester, i never would’ve believed you. and now i have two. 🙂

spring 2011 is officially over. i had my last two finals today and summer is here. well, in theory it is; the weather hasn’t exactly been cooperating. but hey, it’s still early may, so i am sure it will get warm soon.

i had my portfolio review on tuesday. since i am going to be a senior next year (eeek!), i did a junior portfolio review this semester instead of a sophomore review like last semester. the difference between the two is huge! the sophomore review requires you to post your work up on a wall and walk away. the reviewers come for an hour or so and write down their comments and then you come back when they are gone and pick up your work.
the junior review is more like a job interview. you present your work to a panel of staff, explaining your concepts, your choices and your overall design. about a half-hour in total, they then give you feedback and critique. they write down some stuff too, but you don’t get your overall rating until the beginning of the next semester.

despite my nerves i think i did really well. i practiced presenting my boards to my empty kitchen twice before i went, so i think that helped. hahaha one of my staff jurors was the director of the graphic design program, laura golly. talk about intimidating. but she had some great things to say about my work and she gave me some awesome advice. i feel pretty good about the entire thing, but i won’t know for sure until i get that packet at the beginning of the semester telling me what they really thought.

now that this hard semester has finally come to a close (thankfully– this one was a toughy), i am going to go through and recap my five classes for you so you can get an idea of what i have done this semester….

molly and i (as new england school of art and design green team members!) went to the earth day event at the law school last week. she made some boards about sustainability in our classes/programs and about the new building’s LEED certification. we joined a bunch of other suffolk groups as they showed off their most sustainable practices. sodexo provided us with a delicious (and completely vegetarian!) meal, complete with compostable plates and utensils. we then listened to three speakers, which were all super cool.

state representative matthew beaton in involved in the construction world, so he talked to us about sustainable building. he built the first passive house in massachusetts. if you don’t know what passive houses are (i didn’t before this event) you should really check them out. they’re german, and they have these amazing alterations on the typical house that make is so much more energy efficient and save the owner a ton of money (in the long run– initially it’s more expensive. but that’s typically how new technology goes). i could tell he was really passionate about it because the passive house that he built was his own! i think it took him two years or something along those lines, but the results were incredible.

the next speaker was terri goldberg, a representative of NEWMOA (northeast waste management officials’ association). she had a lot to say, and unfortunately did not have enough time to give her whole presentation, but her main passion was chemicals and preventing chemical pollution and poisoning in the environment. she told us about all the amazing laws they had passed to help protect the environment and us from harmful chemicals that are released into the air/water/ground from industrial plants.

lastly, suffolk’s own patricia hogan, who is a professor in the physics department, gave a speech about consumerism. her perspective on how we need to switch from a consumerist lifestyle and mentality in order to live more sustainably in the future (when we have 9 billion people on the planet in 2050) was really refreshing. some of the facts she gave us were terrifying, but i totally agreed with every point she made. i couldn’t stay for the discussion afterwards because i had class, but it was so cool to hear someone else give a talk about something that i am passionate about. there weren’t a ton of people at the event, but there were just enough to make me feel a little less alone in my own quest towards living a sustainable lifestyle. it’s nice to know i am not alone. 🙂