Today I attended a good old fashioned ivy league football game, and luckily Brown beat Cornell at home 27 to 7, in front of a spirited crowd. The weather was crisp, the hot dogs delicious, and the football was fast-paced and entertaining! The photo above is a panorama I made from where I was sitting in the stands.

This week I tried out two cool services: Ponoko and Spoonflower. Both are new entries in a little niche called desktop manufacturing, where you can design something at your home computer and have it fabricated in small quantities without sacrificing quality or paying heavy setup fees.

Ponoko is basically an online laser cutter. You send them outlines created in Illustrator or Sketchup, and then choose from a menu of materials to have your shapes cut from. A few weeks later, you get a package in the mail! I tested it out with some Morroco-inspired stars that I had lying around my hard drive, and cut them out of yellow acrylic. So if you see me wearing yellow acrylic star earrings, you'll know where they came from. :)

Spoonflower is the same idea, but for textiles. You create a square design that can repeat or tile in any direction and then upload it to the site. Choose the size of fabric you want to print (anywhere from a fat quarter up to three yards) and in a few weeks you have your own fabric to work with! This has been my desktop background for a couple months now, but as fabric its destined to be a pair of pillows in a certain New York lady's new apartment.

You know you're in grad school when your professors start saying things like, "Let's hold class an hour later. Class at 8am is uncivilized." Or, "Next week, we will meet at the beach. But first I would like to take you all out to breakfast." Its a strange transition from being a student to being a peer, and we're in the early stages of finding out how to relate to our faculty in this new way.

Luckily for me, the professors leading our thesis studio are fans of beachy locales, and so this past Wednesday we did, in fact, meet at the beach. But first we piled into a caravan of cars and headed to breakfast in Little Compton, RI. We sampled native Rhody fare of Johnny Cakes at the The Commons Lunch, and then proceeded on to Tiverton, RI, to the Goosewing Beach and Nature Preserve.

I brought a trunk full of stuff to play with, but ultimately ended up wandering around tidal pools and tall brush in my new rainboots, taking pictures and exploring the area.

Since my thesis is about reconciling old and new image-making methods, I decided to only use analog methods during this beach trip. Which means I am waiting for several rolls of 35mm and 120mm film to come back from the processor. Score one point for new technology.

I did break down towards the end and snap a few pics with my digital camera after I ran out of fim.. I also toyed around with some letterforms that I cast in concrete last semester, tossing them into the surf at various spots and seeing what happened. At one point I overdid it a bit:

I also misjudged just how strong this stream was when I threw the "ow" brick into the current. I had to dash into the surf to rescue it before it got washed out to sea!

I started my last year of graduate school on Wednesday, and the campus is a whirlwind of activity as we welcome a new provost, inaugurate a new president, and (next week) open a shiny new academic building. There is an optimistic energy around the school these days, and I am enjoying being a part of it, especially having experienced this place in its more cynical persona as well.

This Friday was the inauguration of John Maeda, the 16th president of the Rhode Island School of Design since its inception in 1877. It was held in the First Baptist Church in America (which is not just a dramatic name, it really is the first Baptist Church in America, founded by Roger Williams in 1638 after being expelled from Massachusetts for his crazy insistence on religious tolerance, separation of church and state, and fair treatment of Native Americans. That guy — what a nut!).

To get through to the upper balconies, I had to climb two flights of winding stairs, walk through the music director's office, and squeeze around the timpani drum before I could grab a pew. This office, by the way, could have come straight out of Professor Lupin's classroom at Hogwarts, complete with a small balcony, moldy piles of ancient manuscripts, and a thick rope that emerged from the ceiling, where I believe he could actually ring the church bells from his desk.

I will admit that I am a sucker for official ceremonies like this one, so imagine having one in a three hundred year old church, with an Easter-worthy combination of brass ensemble and pipe organ playing Haydn, the theme from the West Wing (for when the new president walks in, of course!), the Trumpet Voluntary, and all manner of other rousing music. It was all very moving and inspiring &mdash with a dash of scary every time a particularly low organ note would send the whole balcony structure into a noticeable shudder.

After the speeches (which you can read more about here and here), we all filed out into the pouring rain to attend a RISD Block Party. There was a photo booth, a silkscreening station where you could choose what word to have printed on your free "Start _______ Here" tshirt, and lots of food and music.

It was all so unusually pulled together for RISD, a place that regularly botches even the most routine plans. I saw them spirit a US senator out the back door of the ceremony and into a waiting motorcade without batting an eyelash. Hundreds of tshirts were distributed and screenprinted in the pouring rain with apparent ease. Its been happening all week, too. At an orientation lunch, I received a delicious sandwich, packed efficiently inside a canvas tote bag with a bottle of water, an apple, and a RISD caribeener (something I had been needing, actually!) without any sort of bottleneck. There are also these new television screens across campus that pull announcements and event images from online — these screens are properly installed, synced across every campus building, and actually look good.

Those of us who have been here a few years have been watching all this in bewilderment, wondering what happened to our funky, periodically bumbling institution that could have transformed it into a place where stuff actually works. It can't all be due to our new president, and perhaps its only temporary. But everyone agrees that there is a different, more charged energy in the air these days. It will be interesting to see where it leads us this year!

So even with the ridiculously easy goal of posting once a day for the rest of May, I didn't actually post every day. For shame. But its the summer now, and I (theoretically) have time to do stuff like put up some of my favorite stuff from this last semester.

The first thing I will show is related to my earlier How to Make Rubber Molds post, and is quite possibly one of my all-time favorite final reviews ever. These are pictures from the final review of the second in a series of two graduate studios I took last year. We spent the last three weeks building physical objects, and at the end it was decided that we needed an installation to truly showcase all of this tactile work. So a few people commandeered (sp?) the small conference room at the end of our studio and got to work.

The room was anchored by this scene, which is a complete re-creation of my friend Hannah's bedroom to showcase her final project: two pillows placed side-by-side on the bed, with the phrases "When I don't sleep I can't work," and "When I don't work I can't sleep" cross stitched on either one:

It was such an appropriate message for the often compulsively creative and driven nature of the students here, and placing it in the manufactured serenity of a bedroom with these two vibrating messages on top was very effective. The room actually became a makeshift bedroom as thesis presentations loomed closer, and it wasn't uncommon for me to get to studio in the mornings and find someone napping on the bed!

Also in the installation room was a corner dedicated to a collaborative group calling itself Sustain Me, which was dedicated to producing gentle acts of public intervention that educated people about environmental issues. They produced a stop-motion animation about coral reefs using all of these hand-sewn "creatures" and then re-created the installation for the final review.

Mary's awesome "cross-stitched" tape lettering on the fence on the empty lot next to our studio. The building that used to be here burned down the year before I came to school here, and it supposedly housed a very cool diner.

Huy's huge cardboard letters and luscious photographs of them in abandoned buildings.

Melissa's "us" made out of garbage collected from a local lake.

There are zillions more I could show because it was a really cool set of projects! Many thanks to Mary, who put a bunch of the pics from the final review on flickr.

Today was the 125th commencement of the Rhode Island School of Design. I didn't have a camera with me, but as luck would have it, President Maeda was taking pictures of it from the stage and posting them on the RISD flickr account. How cool is that? The image above is of President Mandle giving the opening remarks.

RISD is unusual in that it encourages its graduates to creatively alter and/or destroy their cap and gowns for the ceremony, which results in a parade-like atmosphere as everyone files in for the first time. After the initial "viewing," things are pretty standard from then on. Its a small enough school that everyone walks across the same stage, and the actual masters hoods are actually conferred on stage as well.

Today I stayed for most of graduation, but then raced out towards the end to help set up for a reception that the graduating class was having for their friends and family. There was food from Costantino's Venda Ravioli, cupcakes and amazing baked goods from Scioli Brothers (holy crap their tiramisu was awesome!), wine from Eno, and 60-70 of our closest friends!

It was a great afternoon of toasts, hugs, and relaxed socializing, and now I am totally beat. Time for bed.

Our soon-to-be president has been busy these last few weeks, touring the campus and producing a series of ad-hoc podcasts of various final crits across campus. Its a neat way to experience the unique atmosphere of this place, and perhaps explore what motivates so many people here to become relentless creators:

My First Podcast
Crit Week, Part 1
Crit Week, Part II

Since I finished my Intro to B&W Photography class this past Wintersession, I have been slowly but surely scanning in all of the negatives that I didn't have a chance to print for the class (the ones I did print for class are here). I can see a real difference in the quality of both my exposures and my film developing as I get into some of the later stuff, but its still very helpful to have Photoshop on my side to fix small issues.

Despite a wealth of things to do and see in this region of the country, I haven't really tired of taking pictures of Providence itself, and I wanted to share a few of my favorites. Its such an interesting place, with elements of the old colony butted up against today's modern city. The state itself has a long history of lawlessness — this hasn't changed much mdash; and so there are all sorts of alternative narratives running beneath the surface of the pristinely preserved historic buildings and squares.

Walking along S Main St:

Walking along Canal St:

(coincidentally, that building in the upper left is where I'm staying this week while I take care of Eve.)

One of my last projects of the semester involved creating typographic narratives that lived somewhere out in the real world. As often happens to me with projects like this, I was way more interested in the system of producing my pieces than I was in my ultimate message. I spent weeks developing a method to make rubber molds so that I could make castings of the negative space around letterforms, and finally came up with a process that I really liked:

1. Cut forms out..
   I used sheets of pink insulation foam (around $12 for a six foot sheet at Home Depot) because it was inexpensive, easy to cut, and water resistant. I made a template in Illustrator, traced it out on the foam with marker, and then used a small jewelers saw to cut it out. I was going for a rough-hewn look, so the imperfections of this process were exactly what I wanted. Note that this is a positive of the ultimate shape I want to cast.

   

   
   

2. Mount forms to a base.
   I built a shadowbox-style frame around the form, using "planks" cut from the same sheet of foam, and held together with masking tape.
   
3. Pour the mold!
   I used a mold-making rubber called OOMOO 30. I picked it because the supply store here on campus stocks it, and because of this video. If Martha can do it, I sure as hell can!
   

   

4. Make a cast!
   Now that you have a mold, you can pretty much pour whatever you want in there. Plaster, concrete, wax, soap, water (make ice molds in the freezer!), jell-o, cupcake batter — you name it. Be super careful pulling out the hardened cast from the mold, especially if your original has as many curves and undercuts as mine did.
5. Play.
   Take your new mold outside and play with it!
   

   

Last night I went to the opening of the 2008 MFA Thesis Exhibition, and it was completely overwhelming. I am going to have to go back two or three other times when there aren't so many people around, because I want to sit (or stand) and really absorb everything. The GD peeps did a really amazing job planning out the space and showcasing a wide variety of media within it. I spent an enjoyable 20 minutes or so sitting in the video room watching all manner of short movies, and another stretch of time at the book walk drooling on er, looking at three years worth of book projects.

I didn't get much of a chance to wander around the other departments, but there were two pieces that I really enjoyed.

This ID thesis project by Gretchen Hooker addresses the challenge of providing urban gardening space where local soil is either paved over or contaminated. The bags get filled with soil and have openings at different heights designed to accomodate plants with different root lengths. The weight of the bags keeps them from blowing away, and they even have pockets so that you can anchor a special system of canopy poles to provide shade. I want some!

This ceramics project by Nathan Craven was absolutely stunning, and I was not alone in this opinion because there was a crowd of people around it all night. There were thousands of 6" tall extruded shapes, standing on end, to make an intricate pattern. They went from standing on the floor to being stacked against the wall, and (if you weren't wearing heels) you could stand on top of them and walk around on it. The colors ranged from delicate blues to deep reds, and they were SO gorgeous I wished I could take a piece home with me.

Today was my final review for Digital Type Design, where we all brought 17 copies of a specimen of our type face and then collated them into a book that each of us could take home. Then we went through each person's typeface and got feedback from an outside critic on what went right (and wrong). Here's the type face that I developed in the class. Its called Shoestring:

All in all it was a pretty mellow end of the semester, and it means that I only have three more to go! Oh, except for that silly little thing called proposing your thesis. Right. Tonight my class hung a show in the Graphic Design Gallery of posters presenting each of our thesis proposals. On Wednesday night we'll have an opening reception thats open to just the 14 of us and all of the graphic design faculty, where we'll answer questions, get feedback, and shop for advisors for the coming year. Here's a sneak peek at my poster:

I'm in need of a few eco-friendly sorts to help me out with a project! I am designing (maybe even building?) an online community around small, approachable tasks that affect the way we use natural resources or consume energy. A 43 Things of making a difference, if you will.

What do I need from you? Ideas for goals! I'm looking for small, finite tasks you can do in a day, or a week, like "recycle my old magazines" or "take the bus to work." If you're like me, you have a few of these rolling around in your head, even if they don't necessarily all get done. It doesn't matter if its a one time thing or something that can be done regularly - send it to me in an email at katybeck at gmail dot com!

Many thanks in advance,
Katy.

My weekend, in a nutshell:

I finally managed to locate a window of time when the photography department offices were actually open (a tougher challenge than one might hope) and retrieve my final portfolio from Wintersession. And THEN I managed to find a window of time to actually sit down and scan them in! Miracles do happen.

Enjoy:

There are two sides to the idea of Wintersession: a six week mini-semester during the coldest months in Providence, where you are encouraged to take classes in other disciplines. The official rationale is that it gives students the opportunity to take a break, explore other fields, and meet new people. The popular (and probably inaccurate) student lore is that it was instituted to cut down on the number of students trying to kill themselves in the second semester.

There are your usual offerings of photography and screen printing, bookbinding and metal type, but there are also exotic niche classes like chinese brush painting, glass blowing, machine knitting, and metalsmithing. There are also art history courses, language courses, and study abroad offerings. On the surface it sounds like it'd be relaxing and fun. A chance to get away from the normal grind and explore something creative! But even in a mini-class, the perfectionism and drive that this place has a (not always positive) reputation for kicks in. Very few people are willing to accept that they are beginners at something again, and end up pouring all the time and energy they have into pulling advanced work out of a "relaxing" introductory course. You see all this other great work in crit, and you get caught in this upward spiral of pushing yourself to do better for the next one.

My experience this time was no exception: I took black and white photography, and was in a class with mostly foundation studies (freshmen) students who were deciding which department to join next year, with a few grad students thrown in. Relaxation city, right? Ha. I spent hours, days, whole weekends, standing at my favorite enlarger in the darkroom making prints. I became an expert at getting film from its cartridge onto a developing spool in pitch black without ruining it. I became irrationally protective of the vats of chemistry I was using, not to mention the stupid tongs. I ran the battery down on my iPod at least once each day, and went through several months worth of NPR podcasts. I also think I looked permanently stoned for the last three weeks because my eyes were so irritated by the chemicals.

The result, however, is that I have a really nice collection of prints, and an enhanced appreciation of the artistry that goes into darkroom work. I did most of my final project at the Cliff Walk and Ocean Drive in Newport, which is really gorgeous even, and maybe especially, on freezing cold winter days. I also found a little beach called Easton's Beach, which made me smile and think of my new baby (first?) cousin.

I intend to scan everything and upload to flickr, but only once my instructor gives me back my portfolio!

RISD announced yesterday that John Maeda will be taking over the role of President when Roger Mandle steps down at the end of his school year. Pretty cool! It wasn't the direction I expected the school to take, but considering I've currently got two library books with Maeda's name on the cover checked out for "fun reading," I can't complain.

Check out the great introductory interview with Maeda here. And props to my old team in interactive media, who I am sure produced the video!

These were being given away in the Graphic Design building this past Friday.

Update: If my own mother has trouble figuring out where I am in this photo, I assume it might be difficult for a few others! I am in the second row, just up and to the left of George McFly (the guy in the dress shirt). :)

(I'm trying this new widget that displays images from my flickr account - let me know if you have issues seeing them!)

The Halloween Extravaganza was last week, and it was a hit! There were the inevitable glitches, but overall the students had a good time and the audience enjoyed the show. I had the privilege of wandering around taking pictures of everyone as they worked. By far the most ideal job I could think of for the day.. :)

In a place like this, you can't just have a normal halloween costume contest. You have to have a form-based costume contest, complete with a parade and presentations timed to music. Students are supposed to be researching the work of Oskar Schlemmer and using only cardboard, white paper, and black trashbags. I designed the poster for this particular one because I am a TA for the class, and my fellow grad students Michael and Mary are coordinating lighting and music.

If all goes well, it will be like RISD meets Bauhaus meets Halloween meets Project Runway.

Or it could be a bunch of angsty art students looking ridiculous and getting heatstroke because they've been wearing plastic bags for four hours in a stuffy auditorium.

On the plus side, Artists Ball is this weekend, and this year a critical mass of grad students decided to go. We are doing a group costume, where the loudest and most gregarious of our group will be Doc Brown, and the rest of us will be identically dressed as Marty McFly, complete with red puffer vests and white high tops.

People have historically gone really crazy with costumes at this thing, so I am looking forward to being a part of it.

The excitement in my neck of the woods this week is the graduate graphic design show that opens tomorrow night. The posters above are currently plastered all over campus, with the following tag lines:

A PSEUDO-LINEAR AMALGAM
of work by GRADUATE-LEVEL members
of the GRAPHIC DESIGN PROGRAM,
on view at the SOL KOFFLER GALLERY
at the RHODE ISLAND SCHOOL OF DESIGN,
from OCTOBER 19th through NOVEMBER 4th,
with an OPENING RECEPTION
to inaugurate things properly
at 7:00 PM on OCTOBER 18th.

Your presence at the reception is HUMBLY REQUESTED.
We will, of course, furnish WINE and CHEESE,
along with HAND-CRAFTED CUPCAKES,
and many of the DESIGNERS THEMSELVES
will available for SCINTILLATING CONVERSATION.

It is now confirmed that I have three posters (a series) and one book on display in the show, as well as group billing for a book of work from a seminar for which I was elected "publisher"—a job which nearly killed me at the end of my first semester here. Our printer technician has been astounded by how much paper we have used (300 feet in the last week alone!) in the 44" plotter, printing posters and wallpaper and everything imaginable that can hang in an art gallery.

Last night many of us were down in the gallery hanging posters in earnest, while I walked around mostly getting in the way, but having fun looking at everything. Despite working in such close quarters with my fellow students, there's a lot of work you never get to see, especially from this year's thesis class, so much of the work on the walls is a surprise even to me. Thankfully all of our graduate studio professors incorporated a lull in the workload this week so that we could focus on making this show really fantastic. From what I have seen so far, the gallery is going to be jam packed with amazing stuff!

This photo was taken by my friend Jen, who kindly helped me document my process for a sculpture I'm building this week. Its for my Exhibit Design class, which I am really loving. I am, however, really quite sick of pink builders foam.

Providence is enjoying a long and lazy fall season, with perfectly crisp temperatures and sunny days ever since school started. I have even been able to walk to school most days, which has kept me from feeling sluggish at my studio desk. I am planning on taking the pinhole camera I made this summer out one of these days and documenting all the foliage!

Last weekend I drove down to Warwick to attend the much-anticipated baby shower for Cris, and enjoyed cake and burgers and zillions of cute toddlers. It was a short break in what is already a completely busy work schedule for me. I have all three of my classes condensed into two days (including ten solid hours with the same professor on Fridays), which leaves me with five day weekends. In theory. What really ends up happening is that I am so anxious about finishing everything in time for Thursday that I do schoolwork all five of those days and haven't really had a weekend since school began. Hopefully I can settle back a bit and carve out a day of rest in there somewhere!

Things are starting to speed up here in sunny Rhode Island. Classes at Brown have started for the fall, and there are once again throngs of undergrads crowding Thayer Street. RISD dorms open this weekend, and Orientation for grad students starts Monday morning. Returning grads have started to trickle back into town, and the number of events getting forwarded around on email is on the rise.

The photo above is a still from an early experimental movie called Man with a Movie Camera, filmed in 1929 by a Russian filmmaker named Dziga Vertov, thats being shown on campus this Sunday. We studied it last semester in my History of Graphic Design class, so I'm interested in going to see it. Plus the score for the movie is going to be performed live from the stage, just like the classic movie theaters!

Another sign that summer is over is that today is my last day of work. I've spent the last 10 weeks doing web development for the RISD interactive media department, and one of the fruits of my labor made its online debut this past weekend:

www.risdstore.com

I'm taking advantage of a rare lull in the activity here to give my blog some much-needed attention. I finished up my classes at around 6 this afternoon, and I have spent the entire evening doing everything non-school related. All right, I did cheat and do some reading for my seminar class (an essay called Think/Classify by Georges Perec - I am supposed to be reading another book by Perec for a book club this weekend, but thats doubtful), but for the most part its been an evening of homemade fajitas, tv, laundry, and a cold Killians Irish Red.

I've been working on lots of interesting stuff lately. Mixing neutral primary, secondary, and tertiary colors with gouache and then matching them on my inkjet printer - I am a co-owner of a fancy new wide format Canon printer that uses a cool eight-ink system. Designing a book cover for a fictional Department of Labor document. Creating a photographic tour of my studio (which is up on flickr, in rough form). 10 1x2 inch slides with compositions inspired from the movie Il Conformista.

Just this morning I finished a project known across campus as The 500 - 500 one-inch thumbnail sketches in a week, all based on a small wooden cube and an s-hook, rendered in black ink. Once my camera is charged back up, I definitely want to document that one - its truly an exercise in process and pushing past creative block, especially when you get to your 200th drawing and think you have no more ideas left.

I'm very rarely away from my work these days. I'm in studio or class by 8:30, and I mostly get home after midnight, even on weekends. I have dreams of typography, of the 500, and of concept sketches for Form+Communication assignments. In addition to my studio at RISD, I have a tabletop photography setup in my basement, and anything in between is fair game when it comes to photography projects. (Just the other night I had Adam working as my assistant as I tried to photograph water beading up on my car's windshield.) My main academic building has an art supply store, a commissary (like Entropy @ CMU), and a coffee shop all on the main floor, which means I don't really ever have to leave it!

This morning I went to a lecture on freelance writing and the design media. I was interested in it primarily because Grace Bonney - she's the force behind design*sponge, in addition to doing freelance design writing for magazines - was on the panel. I sat in the back finishing my 500, but enjoyed it nonetheless.

Well, I officially survived my first week of grad school!

This morning I am in the studio, setting up my workspace and starting on a project for my Color class. We drew numbers for our desks during the first day of orientation, and I chose a location that, while farther away from the windows (natural light=bonus!), puts me in a row of other three-year students. I seem to be the earliest early bird to the studio in the few days I've been here - arriving at 9am this morning nabbed me a great free parking spot out in front of the building!

I've been to two of the four classes I'll have this semester, and I already have tons of projects to work on. All of my fellow classmates are amazing, thankfully, and we've already formed a cohesive little unit (there are eight of us in the three year track).

We met up at the RISD Museum last night to attend the opening of Wunderground, which included, among other things, a collection of several thousand art, music, and event posters made during the last ten years in Providence. The show was mind boggling simply for the sheer volume of posters you could look at, not to mention the artistry and craft that went into each one. They were plastered on every available vertical surface, much like you'd have found them in their original form. We did get a good introduction to the bizarre antics that are common at this school: We'd been up in the gallery for about an hour when the sounds of drums started echoing in. Then an entire marching band - dressed up in costumes as devils, monkeys, and various forms of the undead - came dancing through, followed by a throng of dancing art patrons. They stopped in each room and played various songs, and the whole gallery erupted in singing, dancing, and shouting. I tried to get a picture of it for you all, but sadly my camera phone wasn't up to the task. I did find some photos of the opening on flickr, though:

The moving company came in today and packed up all of our stuff. It's anticlimactic, really. You spend all this time frantically getting ready, and then spend eight hours sitting around doing relatively nothing while other people pack your stuff. Eight hours and 90 boxes later, we were all set.

Tomorrow another wave of movers will invade our home and put all of our stuff into the moving truck. Then we'll hop a ride to Baltimore with a friend, stay overnight in an airport hotel, and then jet down to Dallas for Laura and Scott's wedding. We'll then jet up to Philly for the formerly-secret-but-now-revealed birthday party for Elizabeth. Then we'll hop a train up to Providence and, God willing, be reunited with perfectly intact cars and belongings. Who knew we were such jet setters?

In preparation for this move, I have been collecting and archiving a lot of photo CDs that found their way into the nooks and crannies of my home. I will to post a few of my favorites over the next few days!

I received an email from one of my future professors a few weeks ago. It included a list of the books we'd need to buy and familiarize ourselves with before class starts in September. Happily, I actually owned and had read half of the first book, but I immediately ordered the other two on Amazon. For the last two weekends I"ve gotten myself into a nice little Sunday morning ritual: I wake up early, drive to Wegmans, and settle down in the cafe section with a coffee to read my typography books. (At the point when my eyes cross, I switch to planning what meals I want to cook for the next week, and then do my grocery shopping with all the other heathens.)

These books, for the most part, are fairly straighforward introductions to typographic concepts like leading and kerning and the history of letterforms. But every now and then the author slips in something that makes me realize just how much meaning (whether real or imagined) that people can project onto the printed page:

"A typewriter (or a computer-driven printer of similar quality) that justifies its lines in imitation of typesetting is a presumptuous, uneducated machine, mimicking the outward form instead of the inner truth of typography."

I just hope my new Apple is an unassuming, literate sort of computer. Otherwise we might have a problem.

I went up to Providence a second time this past weekend, part two in our attempt to find somewhere to live while I am in school. It was an equally frustrating and exhausting trip, but this time I think we found it! Its a small, two bedroom townhouse on the East Side, about two blocks east of Wayland Square. Not that that means anything to most people, but its a little over a mile's walk from campus, and on bus and trolley lines should I need to get there faster. Wayland Square is an area with shops and restaurants and, most importantly, Starbucks. Its also three blocks from Whole Foods, which means I might actually be able to walk to buy groceries! Besides our must-have items, the place also has windows on three sides and a working fireplace - features I hadn't even bothered to put on my wish list but will thoroughly enjoy.

In between tours I did find time to take one of those amphibious vehicle tours that start by driving around the city and then drive right into the harbor and show you the sights from the water. This was so much fun! I've seen these types of tours in several cities and always wanted to try them, and the weather in Providence was so perfect that I signed up for one Sunday morning before I left. I posted a bunch of pictures in my flickr account. Here are a few I thought were interesting:

Cheap flights home were all sold out, so I ended up taking the Amtrak Acela train back to my car at BWI. It didn't cost too much to upgrade, so I got a first class ticket! This was great fun - my ticket included complimentary dinner and beverages for the trip, so I could order anything I wanted off of the menu and a waiter brought it to my seat. Barely crowded to begin with, the train all but cleared out after we left New York and I had a nice relaxing ride home. Given the hassle of driving through New York, we might look at train travel as a way to get to see friends and family along the east coast.

We got back from Providence Sunday afternoon, but unfortunately we returned apartment-less. We looked at tons of places, but everything in a good location was pretty run down or noisy, and everything that was quiet and well maintained was situated in less-than-ideal locations. It was frustrating, but we did end up learning a lot more about the character of the various neighborhoods. I guess one or both of us will head back up in a few weeks and try our luck again.

Tomorrow I head under the knife to have my wisdom teeth removed - a task I thought I had outlived until my TMJ issues cropped up. For some reason only two of my wisdom teeth ever materialized - on the top right and the bottom left - and I anticipate some really bizarre diagonal swelling over the next few days. Nothing a few quality pain killers and a steady supply of Wendy's frosties can't handle! Still, it pretty much wipes out my entire weekend.

I have also spent my week trying to figure out my own immunization history so that I can meet all of Rhode Island's vaccination requirements for incoming students. Who knew this was such a difficult task?! I've been at my doctors office every day this week - getting shots, drawing blood, dropping off forms, picking up forms - until I felt like I could drive the mile between by house and the hospital in my sleep. At least now I have a recent tetanus booster to protect me as I play - er, work - in the various shops across campus.

Yesterday I received the much-awaited packet of information on the RISD Laptop Program. I get a shiny new Apple 15" Powerbook Pro, which comes seriously loaded with software: Adobe Creative Suite, Adobe Font Folio (you mean I am required to buy 2,200+ fonts for school?? Excellent.) and the Macromedia Studio. Woohoo! They open up orders tomorrow, and it is probably the one thing I will do before heading to surgery. :)

I'm writing from our room in the Radisson Providence Harbor View, which I don't think is as nice as the Biltmore (where we stayed for my interview), but its certainly in a good location. We got here in the dark around 11:30 last night, and drove around a deserted warehouse district undergoing serious road construction, until we saw a delapidated, handpainted sign telling us where we could park our car. "Ghetto" was an appropriate word. This morning things looked a little nicer, and I can see flowers and road landscaping that I missed last night. But we still won't be taking a leisurely stroll from the hotel anytime soon. :)

We went to see our first place already - a first floor apartment in a neighborhood called Fox Point on the East Side of Providence. Its off a little main street with restaurants and offices and funny new age shops offering palm readings and tarot cards. Its all a bit shabby, but in a nice way that tells you it wasn't part of some behemoth suburban developer's master plan. The apartment was nicely maintained, although not as large as the 2 bedrooms advertised. But the kitchen was updated, and the current tenant, a RISD architecture major finishing up her degree, had painted all the rooms in great colors that I approved of. Its one house down from an old stone Catholic church (with bright red doors!) with a French bistro on the opposite corner.

We came back to the hotel after our tour, and Adam is currently zonked out on the bed while I make use of the complimentary wireless internet. Despite all of my work to make this search as stress-free as possible, I have a feeling he will need a nap after every house we visit. ;)

Tonight Adam and I are off to Providence to find ourselves a place to live for the next three years. Hopefully this trip will not include a repeat of the lost luggage and frantic shopping that overshadowed the last time we were there! There are no interviews to go to this time, thankfully, just a lot of walking and driving around neighborhoods meeting with landlords. I've been a complete dork and have prepared a saddle-bound booklet of all the places we're visiting, including annotated maps and all our travel information.

I've been using an awesome website that Laura showed me called mapmyrun.com, which lets me plot and save walking routes on a google map, and then gives me all sorts of information on how far the walk is, and what elevation changes are involved. Its great! I can plot each potential apartment and see what type of walk to campus I would be in for.

I've been moving a little slower than normal this week after a nasty bout of food poisoning over the weekend took me out of work for two days. Besides an unfortunate incident at Camp Ellowi when I was a Camp Fire Girl, I don't think I've ever been that sick to my stomach for that long. I lost 5 pounds in 48 hours! I've filed a report with the Department of Health since the offending food was from a local restaurant. I get to be part of some sort of official investigation now.

Hopefully my stomach won't hold me back from all the searching over the next few days. Wish us luck!

Many thanks to everyone for all the emails and comments and phone calls - its awesome to be able to share my excitement with so many people! :) Its finally beginning to feel real for me, even though I haven't received my "official" letter from the admissions office yet. I've told everyone at the office, and this weekend I started a massive financial projection spreadsheet that would make my Dad proud. I don't know if it rivals the infamous Apartment Matrix, but I have three years to perfect it.

Since I really haven't written much about it (jinxes, you know), this all started back in November, when I flew up to RISD for an info session and made the decision that this would be the year I applied. From that point until the end of January, my only goal in life was to prepare my portfolio. The portfolio is both the best and worst part of applying for a design program: on the one hand, there is no studying, no prep courses, and no test to take; on the other hand, you have absolutely no frame of reference for how you stack up against your peers. Its completely subjective, and working for months and months towards a nebulous goal without any boundary or reference point completely wears you down, physically and creatively.

But ultimately I finished, and raced it off to the post office at the absolute last minute (typical Katy style). Fast forward to two weeks ago, when I got an email from the department head. RISD narrows the initial applicant field down to a smaller group (30 if I remember correctly from the info session) and then asks them all to come up for an interview on campus. So Adam and I hopped on a flight up to Providence!

There were some stressful moments - losing my luggage and racing frantically to purchase new clothes, practicing tough interview questions with Adam, last-minute internet research in the hotel Starbucks - but ultimately I had a great interview and left feeling more confident that it was a place I could thrive in. I've never to date had a leisurely, planned-in-advance trip to Providence, but I do hope I'll get one eventually!

Last week I got another email, with the excellent news that I was accepted into the program - a three-year MFA program in Graphic Design. I'll spend my first year taking core design classes like typography and color theory, and then spend two years in graduate studios working towards a thesis.

So if you've ever wanted to travel to New England, now's your chance - I hope to have lots of visitors. :)

I got in.