As personal blogs allow for some self indulgence, I’m happy to mention report that I went rather well at uni this semester with three Distinctions and a High Distinction. Two of my subjects also kept back my work for ‘example’ use – the grasshopper which you would have seen and my Communication Strategy assignment which was a thematic thing (I worked on one about Housing – particularly in a collective context) – where you researched and established your own brief and from that produced various design outcomes. This is certainly an encouraging terms of gauging that it was a good decision to leave work alone for this last year and just pull a few extra unnecessary things off my plate. It’s also rather nice that the HD was from my Design and Business class where I had a particularly difficult group to work with and I full well feel I deserve every bit of it.

Above is some of the Communication Strategy stuff… my client was the Salvos, want to make VERY clear that it was and is just an assignment and has nothing really to do with them. Badcouch doesn’t exist. However for the sake of something or other, like the rest of any work/photos/writing I put up on this blog it’s © Rebecca Matheson. (I confess although some of my ideas were quite thought out, lots of the Com Strat stuff happened fairly late in the assignment game so finnessing mightn’t have been quite up there, I was a little surprised at the Distinction, but he must’ve liked it or how it all fit together or something).

This cool old-school comic was rather influential for me back when I was younger.

Would love to track down a copy. (And could via Amazon).

I got to visit the Salvador Dali exhibition today. Massive exhibit with a crowd to match – which seems odd as it’s been going a while and it was a Wednesday afternoon. Intriguing certainly. The guy was truly messed up on some levels but exceptionally clever. It freaks me out slightly that I felt some kind of affinity with his story and it interests me also that he wrote. Dali is truly insane, utter genius in his exploration of such a wide variety of both medium and style. The lobster phone was sweet – but not so impressive in person, some of the jewelery very beautiful. So much conceptual work.

The painting to the left: Morphological Echo was my favourite. I really love the repercussions through the image, the repetition, familiarity and yet there is still something disquieting.

I recommend a visit should you be in Melbourne, also take the time to watch the short film that Walt Disney and Dali collaborated on, it’s beautiful, beautiful animation.

Em, Han and I went to the city this morning. I showed off Piccolo and Chapel St Bizzare. Then we wound up at the Art Gallery to check out the Persuaision fashion exhibition. It was small and quite disappointing, the only real redeeming feature was that they had Colin Firth’s Mr. Darcy costume on display, the dresses weren’t very exciting. Had a wander through some of the European section too – love the Mogdilangi that hangs next to Picasso’s Weeping Woman. Then had a sweet little jaunt down Degraves St for a coffee in Hells Upstairs/Hell’s Kitchen and a wander through a few arcades.

And had to get a photo of Han (right) infront of Haigh’s as that’s my nickname for her, Emily just likes being in photos.

If you are viewing this by RSS you will not have noticed that All Said & Done has a shiny new look. It has been very long coming and has morphed entirely. I gave up on creating my own theme (I was nearly there) when I found this nice one typographywp and adapted it to look a little like what I was making in the first place. Why? Well, it’s got some cool little things going for it and is probably safer in IE than mine ever would’ve been.

Along the way I have discovered some lovely new plugins and better ways of doing things. You’ll notice that there is now a quotes (entirely self satisfying) widget and the good-reads/currently reading is lots cleaner. Unfortunately the whiz bang archive method I was going to use couldn’t cope with the oodles of backlog and so is currently not working. It’s a rather large disappointment really as it was quite nice.

So a few minor things to sort out, would appreciate if you notice any bugs/inconsistencies if you would let me know. Which you’ll have to do by commenting because I haven’t re-implemented the contact form yet.

…I’m a bit suspcious the feed itself has changed, which’d be a pain to you all. But better in the long run.

Also interested to know what you think, would you change anything?

Things not working:

• Gravatars seem to be misbehaving
• Favicon issue
• Archives Page
• List on the Categories page is a bit odd

To add:

• Twitter status
• RSS photo in sidebar (once I make photoblog!)
• Working Archives page
• Contact form