Published April 10, 2007 by Rebecca Matheson

Twenty down to Four

Here’s where you help me. Please.

I have made 20 odd postcards – admittedly, some of them quite quickly. Now I need to narrow them down to four final cards.

These must work as a set and all must be in the same alignment – all horizontal/all vertical. Keeping in mind that my word is Chomp and my Image is Tongs, which would you choose? These are meant to be postcards you would give to your friends, apparently.

The only other constraint, the second postcard across on the top row MUST be included as it is the only colour version I have done this size. And it’s probably smart to have at least one that includes both image and word.

Pick three. Probably easiest to follow a format of: Row X, Column X. rather than describing them.

Click the thumbnail to get the larger image.

Design Uni

Published February 27, 2007 by Rebecca Matheson

Words, Illustrations and Faces

Typography this morning where the Tutor is English and very amusing, it should be fun. Met a few more people and had quite a satisfactory gathering in the break.

Digital Design is the class I’m trying to wrangle my way out of in terms of excemptions – today I got a taster. I honestly think I’d be okay in ‘going without’ although I’d have to crash teach myself some Adobe Illustrator skills.

Our first class was on Illustrator, apparently Photoshop will follow. She with no prior experience gets the one computer that hates it’s user. Oh it logged me on, but I couldn’t access anything or get online after two clicks or copy and paste. Really weird. Anyway after finally convincing the tutor that I really had restarted and relogged back in about five times, he worked out that there was some girl in our class that didn’t belong there. She got kicked out, I got her computer. Things were right with the world.

Illustrator is fiddly and will take a bit of getting used to. I can see myself (or whoever) doing extremely cool stuff with it, but after the computer fiasco, I didn’t have the patience. That’s something else I have to do before next week.

Then I was waiting at the train station and this random guy comes up and asks if I got my extension. What? I only half recognised his face and didn’t really have much of a clue at all. I think I established that he had his appointment straight after me and probably had to wait because I was late (among other things). They bumped him straight to second year. “Second years are all rather cliquey”. Perhaps he was lonely? Ho hum. Bit random. Nice guy, with a name I can’t fully remember. Something like Hu Wei.

Tired again. My own fault – she who stays up til all hours only to have to get up at 6am deserves to be.

Design Uni

Published February 20, 2007 by Rebecca Matheson

Karlsonwilker

Today I scraped a bargain. A $60 book for a simple $10.

I cannot yet call myself a fully fledged designer (I’m about 4 official years away from that) and I sometimes feel sheepish about the fact that I don’t like wasting money on magazines – which you know, is a lot of what I’ll probably end up doing. I’m sure there is great benefit to knowing objective, the competition, the actuality of the business. And I don’t really own any design books as they cost about one million in comparison to my hastily diminishing monetary fund.

This is my first buy in terms of a book about design. I have one textbook but that’s about multimedia and one on programing (a hideous pink thing) and this.

This is: tellmewhy – the first 24 months of a New York Design Company. It has a pen mark on the front, hence the drastic reduction and you know, maybe it’s been sitting on the shelf for two or more years. Prior bookshop employee knowledge tells me that covers can be cleaned with eucalyptus oil (or you know water and soap) and hence noted pen mark will become an almost invisible short score line. If I can be bothered.

I started reading shortly after purchase at a university cafe with glorious boho coffee (cup didn’t match the saucer and gave me secret thrills. Weird). The coffee was a mere $2 but worth more. I nearly forgot the coffee for the monograph. Now I’m just showing off (it means book). It’s pleasantly engrossing.

I don’t like buying books new, perhaps such a success will promote an unleashing of my pocket. I hope not. But I do like it.

Books Coffee Design

Published February 8, 2007 by Rebecca Matheson

Advoc8 Redesign

Advoc8 has a new design. I got sick of the horrendous red one and so put up my hand. I also quite liked the fixed Home, Email and Feed icons on this blog so I poked them in as an afterthought. It’s certainly a lot cleaner than the last one, but what do you think? (I also haven’t bothered testing it in various browsers/screen sizes and I keep seeing recently how skewed this one looks so if you could let me know about either looking strange on your computer that’d be good.)

Blogging Design Social Justice

Published February 7, 2007 by Rebecca Matheson