Today is a great day!

General Bullshit, Updates

tl;dr: I officially graduated from college today! Also, terrorists are assholes.

September 11 is filled with a mix of mostly sad and angry emotions for most of us Americans who witnessed what happened in 2001. But for me, its not just meaningful because of those events. Let me explain:

On September 11, 2001 I was supposed to fly to Atlanta for work. Obviously because of what happened that morning, I didn’t go to Atlanta on that day. I went two and a half weeks later. Because of this, a series of events was set in motion that eventually led to me moving home to Colorado from Blacksburg, Virginia. This was a very good thing for me, and helped me get my life back on the right track.

On September 11, 2008 My abusive relationship ended. Thank god for that. I know, I’m atheist, but “thank goodness” just doesn’t express the depth of relief I felt when it ended and I was finally free of him and his negativity and cloud of oppression. And, I got my first iPhone the next day! Which was so fucking awesome and felt like a great symbol of my new freedom at that moment.

Now today, September 11, 2014 I just found out that I have officially graduated from college! Yep, I get to check the “college graduate” for the education question on surveys now! Holy crap does this make me so happy! I’ve been working on this degree for nearly 20 years now, and to finally have finished, well, its frankly amazing to me that my attention span held that long.

So, I’m gonna go update my résumé now and not dwell too much on the sadness of the past, because that would be letting the terrorists win. I’ll be damned if I’m going to let a tiny group of extremist assholes ruin this day for me.

The current state of EDM in the U.S.

EDM, General Bullshit

Oh, I have a lot of thoughts about this, but mainly I just wanted to say this: Unless you’re paying attention to what is going on with deep house right now, your are missing out on where the excitement and interesting stuff is going on right now.

Seriously.

Deep house is the where the real good shit is at right now.

Well, guess my branding designs are not far off the mark of my target audience

Design/Art, General Bullshit, Thesis

I just noticed the updated branding for Lollapalooza’s web site. Retro 80’s music technology? Check. Illustrative style? Check. Bright bold color palette? check.

Check out my branded stickers

Check out their site

Well, at least I have a very easy defense for my branding: Lollapalooza thinks similar branding styles and imagery are appealing to their target audiences, which also happen to be mine.

Illustrator Art Boards and Layers

Design/Art, General Bullshit, Thesis

Does anyone else find it as infuriating as I do that illustrator does not have separate layers for each art board? Why? Why do I not have this option?

Each time I start on a new art board, I have to create more layers and try to remember which ones are on each art board.

Maybe it’s because I was much more fluent in InDesign first and got used to thinking in terms of pages and layers there, I don’t know, but I find it annoying enough to write a bitchy post about it.

Bad responsive design rant

Design/Art, General Bullshit

Dear Designers of the Internets and Websites. When I’m on my laptop or my desktop I do NOT want to view a “mobile-fied” version of your damn sites.

This truly bothers me.

I know, I know, responsive design can really simplify development, present a consistent experience and numerous other advantages. However, one of the advantages of using a laptop or desktop is the MUCH larger screen size. I’m getting real tired of having kindergarten-size pictures, which make sense on mobile platforms because of the smaller screen size, take up my whole damn screen on my laptop.

It now takes me much longer to see/read/scroll through (oh! the endless scrolling!) websites that I was able to quickly scan before.

Don’t get me wrong, I dig the pictures, and I like that people are paying attention to how things are presented, but can I have smaller images & more information on my big screens? I feel like all sorts of space is not being used as effectively as it could be.

Perhaps the sites that bother me most are just poorly implemented designs, but man, there seems to be a lot of them out there now and it pisses me off.