Our business plan wound around this idea of converting food scraps from restaurants into organic fertiliser: yes it can be done, our focus was on the service of waste removal and forging links between the food and farming industries. This is the logo I designed for Waste Organics… it was done quickly (it’s not quite even) and the idea to me still seems a little too cutesy or something that resonates with the word flabby – but it probably works for what it is. The kind of nice irony is that apparently ‘dandelions are a logo design trend for 2009‘ – I did not know this before today. There is also a secondary version with the forks growing – for the future projection with farming involvement.

I am truly glad to see the tail end of this class, it tried my patience no end and I did have to do a lot of the work, but all up it was a kind of pleasing outcome. Cheers and good riddance.

This is the nicest blog I have ever seen. Functionaly, navigation, interactivity (in how it draws you in) – it’s all superb. Naturally, it’s the guy who also designed the WordPress logo. I truly love web design and have a niggling regret now and then that I did the swap from multimedia to communication design. Yes the Deakin course was the wrong one, but I can’t help thinking I should’ve gone to Swinburne Multimedia over Swinburne Communication Design. At least my sideline love affair with CSS can continue and perhaps one day I will reach the point of worthy of making such a splendid website. For now I must continue to hack away and try things in my spare time. A little more injection of ambition and risk might be good too.

Jason Santa Maria

To celebrate, I am handing out gifts.

Here are the gifts.

I’ve not done this kind of thing before on here, but $500 goal is a very small amount in the scheme of things, and $5 or $20 is even less. Tear do some great work and the people behind it are guns – besides being brilliant and inspirational. And yes I can verify that because know many of them in person.

Defining this day would be the glorious mistake (which I’ve made before) to drive into the city instead of catching public transport. The driving is okay, it’s just the lack of parking and the lying GPS that got to me. I never found the place… I found Kinkos near uni instead and they turned out cheaper.

So then there’s the $103 on printing. And apparently I got a good price.

Plus the freaking huge small mistake of gluing the wrong edge of my book when I was binding. With $103 of printing, you don’t want to make that mistake. Mercifully it was fixable, not entirely 100% happiness but lets go with 80% happiness (inclusive of stress).

This binding video is good.

Now the book is bound, my group proposal is bound and the presentation is early tomorrow. My animation is complete if not a little corny, and my Visual Language posters are done – all I have to do it bulk out the VL research journal and it’s happy land and handing it all in for me.

Lets see, it’s taken me approximately 2 hours to wind down from being on edge for 4 hours + an extra 1 hour. That’s not too bad at all…

Friday I love you so much, you should come sooner.

image source, please check it out, it’s good.

I finally managed to get my hands on a library copy of this book and am already eternally grateful. Shaugnessy has written a brilliant book that talks about the Design industry through it’s pitfalls and triumphs, it is gloriously practical, interesting and well written. I am a fan.

This takes the shiny button for the ‘best’ of design books that I’ve read thus far, just ahead of tellmewhy by karlssonwilker. Very different, incredibly helpful. I even feel vaguely prepared, although I’m sure that’s naive.

On another note, I’ve been exploring illustration lately… in that I’ve been thinking about it rather a lot and am getting these small hits of inspired glee. I bought a CAP magazine on Illustration a little while back but I’m holding out until holidays, where those things that I “have” to do aren’t getting in the way.

My branding assignment for the school is FINALLY coming along. I need to meet up with them again to discuss through some of the concepts that I’ve come up with. Still battling to get a decent linear mark as the uni brief requries that we produce: a linear, solid, abstraction, postive/negative, pictogram.

There’s also the issue of distraction. I’m really good at the whole distraction thing and I’m hoping after the 4 or 5 episodes of Gilmore Girls last night that I’ve worked screen related procrastination out of my system. A camera would be a distraction.

As it goes, yesterday I put in a mammoth effort and completed my 2D animation rotoscope related brief and worked out that there are quite literally millons of ways you can put 3 very similar, relatively boring rotoscoped work together. It’s kind of quirky, I’m sure there are areas I could improve on and I’m really sick of listening to the ragtime soundtrack but it’s done and it’s something out of the way that is due on Thursday (and worth 50% of the subject).

What occupies my mind at present and is suffering from distraction is a group assignment for Managing Design – it’s a proposal based on the Future Melbourne project. I am doing the bulk of the actual writing (tasks divided up according to strengths) and we have a presentation on the draft on Tuesday. The problem is not in writing, but in sitting down for long enough to concentrate the words out of me.

The best technique thus far is taking the mac to a cafe and isolating myself from the internet. But as I’m still in my pyjama’s, that’s probably not the best option right at this moment.

Back to it.

image source

On a slightly *lighter note, post of the day to Naked Pastor for Flee to the Desert, because I thoroughly identify.

*as aptly pointed out this is not lighter, merely different

Melbourne has been subject to some angry winds and a dirty brown sky due to the very tail end of a cyclone coming from the west and some Port Phillip Bay winds. Such bad winds that they canceled uni classes (I was in for all of half an hour). Truly it was more dangerous at Glenferrie than Prahran where I am but hey. My train was late (power issues) slightly expected, then the other train finished it’s trip far too early due to trees down – I grabbed a bus in quite good time only to have it arrive at the secondary stop to find the door of the bus was stuck. They finally opened it, but made us change busses (again I succeeded onto getting on quite an early one). This bus took me to the station before mine which meant yet another bus – also thankfully right there and with working doors.

I went inside for about two minutes and then drove back in towards the city to pick up Geoff who would’ve been even more stuck than me. So after leaving uni at 2:00pm, I officially ‘got home’ at 7:00pm. By then the power was out. So we went to the supermarket (the nearby one was closed due to no electricity). Just as we pulled in the drive, the street lights came on. We cheered.

So my day was all up pretty sucky (which is why you’re getting a whingy ‘this is what happened’ post) except that I met three new people at uni, caught up with a girl I know a little bit from last year and became reaquainted with another two.

Today I like people but not trains, busses or wind. And I’d really prefer it in future if the sky stayed a normal colour.

NB. This is not my original layout, this is a duplication of an existing layout from a Notebook Magazine, this is me spending lots of time with a ruler both in hand and on the computer. Aside from the headings, there is placeholder text where actual text should be and due to my lack of cash, I did not buy the fonts they used and so have used ‘similar’ ones in substitution.

Click to enlarge >>

Oh, and I did a little ad for something related to my work the other day.