Recently in Design & Photography Category

This week is d-day for my annual freelance project -- creating the program for the Miss Houston Pageant. Which means I won't be doing much of anything outside of working, designing, and sleeping this week.

This year we seem even further behind than usual. There are always girls who send their photos late, and advertisers who send their ads late. Lateness would not be quite as big an issue if what they sent was correct. But the ones who send late tend to be the ones who also don't follow the specs. There are the ones who send a 2x3 at 72 dpi photo they saved off the internet despite you specifically request a 5x7 at 300 dpi. And there are the ones who send lovely ads with photos that run right to the edge of the page, but their file is sized to 8.5x11, instead of the 8.75x11.25 I need to effectively print a full bleed, and their text is so close to the edge of the page that enlarging it slightly would mean that the text gets cut off. And there are the ones that insist on trying to fix the file themselves, instead of complying with my polite request to have their photographer or designer send the file directly to me.

It's not their fault, and I'm not blaming them. They're not designers or photographers, and I don't expect them to know exactly how to do things. But I do get tired of the endless polite emails saying "this file is not large enough, here are the requirements, please try again." Perhaps I should make a tutorial. But I doubt anyone would actually read it.

Jose's mom is visiting us for the week. Tickets from Corpus Christi to Houston get so cheap on Southwest that if you wait for the right time, you can fly round trip for $78. That's within a few bucks of what we pay for gas each time we drive down there -- one tank there, one tank back. Anyway, the cheap ticket prices let her come for a longer visit than usual, so she flew in on Saturday and leaves next Monday.

We can't take the week off work, so she's been hanging out at the house during the day. Yesterday I came home and she had made cupcakes. Yum! Then while I went for a run, she started making dinner and it was ready right when Jose got home from class at 7:00.

Just like I say whenever my own mom comes to visit and does my laundry: I could get used to this!

In other news, last night we finally went live with two websites I've been spending every free moment working on since mid-January. (They're paying me, so the comment about spending all my free time on it is not a complaint in any way, but merely a statement of fact.) After spending so much time on them, I find myself looking at them now and thinking that they don't look like they should have taken so much work. Hmph.

Anyway, if you are curious, here they are: misshoustonpageant.com and missbayareapageant.com. I've been working with the pageant producer for a couple years now; you may remember a mention here or there of creating the program book each year since early 2008. This time around they wanted a refresh of their very stale old site. They seem really happy with the result, so I'm happy too.

While I was at my parents' house in Charlotte for Christmas, I pulled about 10 boxes of old slides down from the dusty shelves of one of the bedroom closets. After taking them all out of the carousels and packing them up snugly in a box, I sent them off to ScanCafe, a company that will scan old photos and slides for you.

Me circa 1979

I was slightly nervous about this, and my parents even more so -- the thought of sending all these slides, some of them as much as 30 years old, into the void was intimidating. But they'd been sitting in boxes, untouched for years. And MAN, I really wanted those photos. And digitizing is even better, since we can all have our own copy.

At my grandparents' (mom's side) mobile home in Myrtle Beach, circa 1979

So off the box went in early January to California, where the company processed the order and sent the slides on to India. INDIA!! Our cherished memories were going halfway around the world, and what if they disappeared??

Mom circa 1979 (cool jacket, Mom!)

But realistically, none of us were ever going to take the time to scan them. And even if I did, the task would probably never be completed. At least not in THIS decade. So they would have likely remained in their boxes up on the top shelf of the closet for another 30 years.

Grandmother (dad's mom) near the barn in Pennsylvania

Yesterday, almost a month after the slides were put into the hands of UPS and ScanCafe, I got an email telling me the scans are online!

Pumpkin Carving with Dad, circa 1979

I get to flip through them all, and mark the ones that I don't want to keep, but who am I kidding, I'm keeping them ALL. Then after finalizing the order, they ship the originals back with the scans on DVD.

The twins, looking surprised

Unfortunately for Katie and Brian, the slides are mostly of me, then David and me. My dad appears to have given up the slide hobby shortly after the twins were born.

David, Brian, Katie, and Me circa 1983

But man, the results are SO AWESOME. I almost broke into tears when I started looking through them -- all these awesome photos, all these memories of my childhood. I'm so, so happy we decided to ship them off for scanning, and I'm so, so happy that we're all going to have these photos to keep. I'll hold final judgment until we have the DVDs in hand, but at the moment this is looking like the best $277 I've ever spent.

Houstonist has put together another great 600 sq mi photo show. (You might remember the first one two years ago.) It will be at Xnihilo Gallery for basically the month of October, and one of my photos is featured in this year's show. If you're up in that part of town, check it out!

So my cover didn't win the class contest. In fact, it didn't even finish in the top three! That was a little disappointing, but I'm over it. Design, after all, is a very subjective thing. As I was working on my cover, I told Jose that while I was happy with how it was turning out, I wasn't sure that it was exactly what the newspaper was looking for (based on looking through their archives). After seeing their top three, and their winner, I am absolutely certain that mine just wasn't what they were looking for.

The winner was a piece that the designer described as follows: "I just wanted to make something with shock value." It was two little Southpark-like cartoon characters, a boy and a girl, and the boy had ripped the girl's heart out and was holding it in his hand.

So. Yeah.

One of the coolest parts was the background, which was a lovely patterned wallpaper. When asked how it was created, the designer said they downloaded the texture from a website.

So. Yeah.

It was actually a very well-done cover, so I don't want to sound petty. It wasn't something that I would have created, but it was visually impressive and eye-catching and the designer obviously put a lot of time and effort into creating it. And they also understood what the newspaper was looking for, I suppose, in creating something purely for shock value.

However, she didn't do all the work herself. The assignment parameters specifically said everything must be original, and I don't count downloading a texture and using it as "original." (Not to mention that most free downloads have provisions against commercial use.)

Our professor read the email from the newspaper editor on why it was chosen, and two of the other considerations were that the design left plenty of empty space for headlines and such, and that it would print well on cheap newsprint. That made me a little annoyed with our professor, since I felt that those constraints should have been included in our assignment parameters if they were going to be part of the judging considerations.

Anyway, now it sounds like I'm just whining so I will definitely end it here! I still like my cover a lot, and based on the feedback you guys gave me, I'm going to tweak it a bit, remove the masthead, and keep it as a portfolio piece.

Thanks for all your suggestions!

I took two classes this semester at UHCL to finish up all my class requirements for my Master's in Digital Media Studies. I still have to do the final project, which is a 500-hour requirement, but I expect to officially graduate in December. One of the classes I took was quite possibly the worst class I have ever taken in my 10 years of post-secondary education. But as of yesterday, it. is. OVER.

The other class is much more enjoyable. Our final project, due later this week, is to create a cover for Free Press Houston, a local alternative newspaper with a circulation of about 65,000. They publish twice a month with a focus on arts, entertainment, music and events. Their website says they are "locally owned by people from Houston who hate people from Dallas and Austin." So you get the picture. ;)

Our assignment parameters were pretty simple: "Think about your life's mission. Think about the social and political issues that have formed your identity. Using your deepest motivations, create a cover for the magazine 'Free Press Houston.' The covers designs will be jurried by the Design Staff at Free Press Houston, and the winning cover design will appear on a summer 2009 issue."

There are only 8 people in my class, so I figure my chances are pretty good. Before I talk about the details, here is the cover I've created.

I ended up going with a theme that Jose and I talk about a lot, thanks to his immense interest in biological and medican science and our shared interest in science in general. There's been a lot of debate in Texas over the past year or so about teaching evolution in schools. Of course the issue is far more complicated than I could ever summarize in a single paragraph, but basically there is large and vocal group who believes evolution should be taught as only one "weak" theory of how life came to be, and that creationism and/or intelligent design should be given equal weight. And this idea came very close to being passed by the Texas State Board of Education.

Now I don't want to start a debate, but suffice it to say that I believe evolution has significant scientific footing, and that creationism does not have a place in public schools.

ANYWAY, the real point of this blog is solicit some constructive criticism -- not of the theme but of the design -- since I am really hoping to win this class contest and have my work published. Can you tell what the image is? Can you read the quote? (Keep in mind that printed size would be 10" x 13.5" so it's understandably harder to read on a screen.) Do you like the way it looks? Is it eye-catching?

If you have thoughts, let me know.

We did go over to check out our house last night. There wasn't anything new to see from Friday, but the backhoe disappeared and coils of rebar and thick metal cables appeared in its place. I took a few more pictures of the plumbing layout, since the guys in my office assured me that it would be helpful in the future to know where the pipes run. But the more exciting part is that we met Paige and Mike, our future across-the-street neighbors! They saw us walking around and came over to say hello. He works for Boeing and she's a stay-at-home mom who does some work for their church. They have two daughters (who we didn't meet) and were super nice. They also said both of our next-door neighbors are nice people as well. Meeting them only made us feel even better about choosing to build where we did. We feel very comfortable with the neighborhood.

Afterwards, we stopped by Fry's to buy a new printer. See, Jose bought a new printer maybe a year ago. When he did, I started using his for my projects because it had better print quality for all my class projects. (My HP still worked fine, but it was 5 or 6 years old and didn't print quite as crisply as the new ones.) After a few months of not using my printer at all anymore, I gave it away on Freecycle.

Turns out that Jose's printer is an ink HOG. After a year of use, we've spent five times as much on ink cartridges, which seem to last about 50 pages, as Jose spent on the printer itself. It runs through ink like a man dying of thirst in the Sahara. And the worst part is that once it runs of ink in any color, you can't print anything -- so even though it's only out of, say, blue ink, it won't let me print in black and white! I finally had enough when it ran out after about 30 pages of me printing drafts of the Miss Houston program last week.

We checked out the options at Fry's. I would really like a printer that can handle 11x17 or larger, but the large format printers are 1) more expensive and 2) don't have the scanning and copying features included. As much as I'd like to be able to print class projects and larger photos at home, I can't justify the cost, at least not yet. (Maybe if I ever get around to seriously pursuing a home-based freelance business.) So we eliminated the large format printers and looked at the all-in-ones, since Jose wants to keep the scanning and copying features that his Epson had.

I've always heard great things about Epson, but the experience with Jose's made me extremely hesitant to buy another one. In the end, we left with the Canon MP980. It had all the features we want, the sample prints looked great, it was priced under MSRP to start with, and Fry's was offering a $100 rebate. Sold! As a bonus, it's also wireless so I can stick it wherever I want without worrying about it being within cord's reach of the computer.

I didn't get a chance to set it up last night because I was busy watching the Tarheels absolutely KILL Michigan State, but I'm hopeful that it will be a great printer!

This is the kind of weather that I wish would last all year, but that only actually lasts for a few weeks. It is really beautiful outside today after a thunderstorm rolled through through this morning while I lay in bed still half asleep. I have a late sim tonight, so I was able to lounge under the covers until almost 10:00!

Jose and I took the afternoon off work yesterday to make the trek back to the Coventry design center in northwest Houston to finalize all the choices for our house. I'm excited to know that we have literally signed off on every doorknob and every tile in our house -- we even got to pick the grout color for the tile and the mortar color for the brick outside. Our sales counselor told us last week that they have all the permits required to start building, so they were really just waiting on us to finalize all the options. We'll go sign the final contracts with our sales counselor tomorrow (her name is also Sarah) and then we're off to the races. I can't wait to see action on our lot. So exciting.

In other news, wedding planning continues and you can check the wedding blog if you're interested in that. I finished up a big design project for the Miss Houston pageant last week; I did their program again, just like last year. I had hoped that this year would be a bit easier since I'd done it once already, and while it did take a little less time, I wouldn't call it easier. It basically occupied every moment outside of work for a week. But I'm happy with the final project and it's nice to have another bullet item for my design resume.

One of the design classes I am taking this semester is an independent study in the sense that we rarely meet with the professor; however, our first project was done in groups of 4. The assignment was to create a board game -- board, rules, cards, pieces, box and all.

The game is called Logo A Go-Go and it's all about marketing and logos (yeah, we may be able to design but we're not game-makers, what can we say). There are 4 categories, a la Cranium or Trivial Pursuit -- old logo identification, sketch the logo, logo trivia, and logo typography. (We did come up with better names for each of those.)

Each person in the group came up with 25 questions and then I designed the cards themselves, all 100 of them. As a team, we each designed potential icons for the categories and the group chose mine (seen on the backs of the cards and on the game board) to use for the final product. I also designed the ink splatter pattern. My other group members designed and put together the game board, pieces, rules, box, and puzzles (which you assemble as you answer questions correctly). Since I designed most of the elements that are repeated on everything, like the splatter and the icons, it was really cool to see it all come together.

Later in the semester we will all get together to play our games. The other group will play ours and we'll try theirs. Who knows how that will go, but at least it looks good. I was pleasantly surprised at how well it turned out!

Last night Jose and I made taco chicken with corn salsa from his "quick & easy" cookbook and it was quite tasty. I also ran 3.5 miles. The New Year is off to a good start, and I think the motivation of wearing a wedding dress in front of all of my closest friends and family will keep me on track for a while.

I've spent the past couple days trying to come up with a name for the design website/shop/business that I want to create this year. It won't be anything huge at this point, but I do need to place to show off my work, offer my services, and potentially sell a few photos or prints. It's amazing how difficult it is to come up with a name that is 1) short, 2) easy to say, and 3) not already taken by someone else (that is to say, it has to be fairly unique)! I've been reaching way back into my childhood trying to come up with words, phrases, things, places, items, colors...you name it. I've tried coming up with names that fit my initials, both old and new (SRG and SGR -- just flip the R and G). I still can't come up with anything I really like.

I browsed Etsy for a while to get examples, and saw lots of names like Green Chair Press, Little Bird Press, Orange Beautiful, Tiny Warbler, Red Bean Design, and Sunlit Letterpress. I'm looking for something that fits that pattern -- short and easy to say -- but that means something to me. I'm drawing total blanks. If you have any suggestions, by all means post or email them to me.