What have I got cooking? I’m so glad you asked.

I survived my first semester teaching, in no small part due to the number of evenings spent eating Old Bay fries and making ridiculous doodles with my design peeps:

I met a 6-hour old Mollie Danger, the world’s newest, tiniest superhero:

Spent St. Patrick’s Day with two authentic Irishmen and a handful of impostors. One of whom might have been a five day old superhero.

Went to Brimfield. Came back with piles of vintage maps and patent filings:

Flew home to wish my not-so-little brother a happy 30th:

Took a little trip. Enjoyed the ho hum view:

Up next: Cape Cod! I’ve already started the limoncello.

The students in my web design class are currently working on a project involving collections. They have been tasked with gathering 10–15 objects or ideas that are meaningful in some way, and designing a website that presents the collection to a larger audience. As inspiration for the design phase, and as a way of getting them thinking about how to tell the story of their collection, I posted a few examples on our course blog. I think they might be interesting for a wider audience as well, so I’m reposting here.

A collection of collections

Since we didn’t quite have time to go through these in class on Friday, I’ve collected a few of the examples I was going to show here. Hopefully they give you some inspiration as you think about organizing and presenting your own collections!

Pictory
Pictory is a curated monthly collection of photographs centered around a theme, along with their associated stories. They manage to make an incredibly basic structure — all on one page, read vertically or using the left and right characters to jump from story to story — and make it interesting using a strong typographic grid and photographs. The level of curation is also really apparent: each story and photograph is powerful on its own, but the order they’ve chosen for the overall collection of photographs, emails, tweets, etc, has its own arc as well.

Sweet Gifs
Who doesn’t like animated gifs?! If you take the time to go through it, though, what appears to be simple is actually a massive collection. They’ve kept the presentation in the spirit of an animated gif itself — linear, repetitive, and with a good dose of ridiculous.

Lisa Congdon — A collection a day
An example of organizing and presenting a collection (in this case many many collections!) using the physical qualities of its contents.

Andy Warhol — Time Capsule 21
Ignore for the moment that this is kind of a dated Flash app, and take a look at the field of overlapping images that serves as the main “menu” to this collection. Sometimes a collection is interesting because of sheer volume alone, or because of the randomness of its contents. There is no order you can put things in that makes sense, really, so giving visitors the ability to sift through the clutter visually is an appropriate choice.

Clip, Stamp, Fold
An exhibition site done by the excellent folks at Project Projects, showcasing a collection that is notable not only for its physical qualities (different sizes, colors, proportions) but also for its evolution through time. By using a timeline filled with thumbnails that remain in proportion to their full-sized counterparts, you as the reader get two ways of accessing this collection in one.

Mass MoCA — Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective
If you haven’t made a trek out to the Berkshires to see this museum, and this collection, I highly recommend it! (The LeWitt show in particular will be installed for something like the next 25 years, so you’ve got some time.) Like the previous example, this site gives its users multiple ways of engaging with a collection — showing them all in a grid, and also locating them on a set of diagrams of the building itself.

This was also a nice example of choosing appropriate supporting materials: LeWitt left instructions for these pieces as opposed to finished work, knowing that any museum that chose to “install” the piece would effectively create a completely unique visual form. Knowing this, including a time lapse of each piece as its made is a really nice choice.

PhilaPlace
A collection of stories about in Philadelphia over the course of several centuries. Something we’ve all seen, I’m sure, but with the twist of dropping a very modern Google-style pin map on top of an historic map of the city.

MoMA — Bauhaus Retrospective
Pardon the second reference to Flash, but this was also a nice example of organizing and presenting more historical information.

Miranda July — No One Belongs Here More Than You
Ok, so this isn’t technically a collection. But I wanted to include it because it illustrates so beautifully how simple a website can really be. Its one linear loop of pages, made solely using images and a “next” button, and yet it’s an incredibly effective narrative.

Miranda July — Learning to Love You More
This site is hard to actually read, so proceed with caution when using it as inspiration graphically. But the premise of the site is interesting — it’s a collection of “assignments” for other people to complete and respond with their results. An intangible collection that elicits tangible feedback.

Michael Beirut’s The 100 Days Project in Design Observer
Not exactly related to what we’re working on in class, but an incredibly interesting article nonetheless! Consider it a bonus.

This week I have been remembering my grandmother, who passed away a year ago on Monday. I began this post shortly afterward, but never quite found the right words to describe the experience. Today, hopefully, I have.

My grandmother Mina (one half of the grandparents I called Mom and Pop) passed away this week, just three weeks shy of her 89th birthday. I skirted into town for her funeral ahead of the largest snowstorm Dallas had seen in living memory, and my dad, brother and I spent one precious, uninterrupted day working on a collection of images of her life to show at the funeral. We were set up in the dining room, cocooned by snow and circumstance, with a fire in the massive fireplace and every photo album, slide deck, and 8mm film reel in existence amassed on the dining table, along with assorted laptops, scanners, and mugs of coffee.

I can only imagine the exasperated eye rolls of my more verbal friends if they had been watching us that day, because not at any point did we actually talk about what we were feeling. What we did, to use a design term, was make. We spent hours sifting through the piles, talking about who was in each photograph, scanning the ones that were especially meaningful, and even calling relatives to put names to faces we didn’t recognize. We sorted and resorted the images into a digital slideshow, writing captions where necessary. Music was considered, and iTunes libraries searched. Its a bit of a cliche at this point that making is a form of thinking, but I think that making is also one of the ways I interact and communicate with the world around me. What I hadn’t fully realized was how much of that trait I share with my immediate family.

The night before the funeral, it started to snow. It continued to snow throughout the next morning at the graveside service, which made the whole experience very cold and quiet and intimate. It was still snowing as we drove to the memorial service, where we discovered a church that had been without power or heat since the night before. So we lit candles, and sat huddled together in the pews under church blankets and coats. Mom had been in the Navy, so we sang the Naval hymn a cappella, and strained to hear the pastor give his eulogy.

At the time I was sad because instead of the long-time pastor that I had expected — who had already baptized, married, or eulogized three generations of my family — there was an absolute stranger up there trying to commemorate her. At first his attempt to paint a meaningful portrait of Mom from only from a few week’s worth of secondhand stories and collected emails seemed jarring. But I think that it was this distance that allowed him to touch upon a theme that perfectly embodied Mom: she was present. A warm, present center of a loud and frequently irreverent family. When circumstances failed her, she was present even as her family grew, then shrank, then grew again around her. When memory failed her, still present in the middle of some boisterous family gathering, laughing and enjoying herself. And ultimately when language failed her, still using the tone of voice and body language of someone who simply wants to be there with you.

The irony of that day was that with no power there could be no computer, and with no computer there was no slideshow, but it didn’t matter. It was my chance to discover just how important those twin legacies of making and being present are, and my way of honoring the life of a woman who bestowed them on me.

Mina Elizabeth Sutcliffe Harris was born February 28, 1921 in Nutley, New Jersey to Robert & Marion (Chandler) Sutcliffe, and passed away on Sunday, February 7, 2010 in Dallas, Texas. She grew up in Trenton where she graduated from New Jersey State Teachers College earning a Bachelor of Science in Education. After briefly teaching in Trenton, she joined the Navy during World War II where she met her husband Rex Simpson Harris. She was an avid bridge player, and during her life had interests in photography, travel, golf and was always a lover of dogs. She coped with difficulties that life gave her with quiet strength. Preceded in death by her husband Rex Harris, sons Mike Harris and Ted Harris, and brother Robert Sutcliffe. Survivors include son Roger Harris and wife Jennifer, their children Katy and Jeff; daughter Nancy Harris Leahy and her children Callie and Cayce; children of Mike Harris, son Clint Harris, daughter Alison Willard and husband Eric, their children Tatum and Easton, and Clint and Alison’s mother Carol Harris; and Mike’s daughter Emma Williams and her mother Ann Harris Williams. She leaves behind many close friends and extended family that will miss her warmth and loving nature. The family would like to extend their deepest gratitude to the staff at Sunrise at Hillcrest for their continuing kindness and care. A memorial service will be held at 2:00 pm on Thursday, February 11 at Northridge Presbyterian Church of Dallas, 6920 Bob-O-Links Drive. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the National Alzheimer’s Association.

For a variety of reasons, I found myself at the office late Friday night with time on my hands. I exhausted my entire backlog of Google Reader items (!) and switched to my second favorite form of internet time wastage: flickr. In the process I discovered a treasure trove of pictures that I had uploaded but never actually made public! My favorite by far is this collection from last year’s fourth of July weekend, when I capitalized on the long weekend and went home to visit family and celebrate my grandfather’s birthday.

There may or may not have been cupcakes involved. We’re looking into it.

View the whole set on flickr.

I tried out a new web tool this weekend, and I think the results are pretty neat. It takes all of your public photos — in my case its my flickr photostream — and strings it together in a rapidfire video summary of your life in photos. I thought I’d share mine.

The tool is called Pummelvision, and it takes either a Flickr, Tumblr, or Facebook photo feed as its source, and dumps the resulting video onto either Vimeo or YouTube.

I began sorting through some of my sketchbooks last night in preparation for moving. I don’t know who I was fooling thinking this would be productive — yours truly inevitably ends up sitting on the deck with a glass of wine, reading through old course notes, doodles, book recommendations, and shopping lists all jumbled together in stack after stack of Moleskine notebook.

[These Moleskines, to be exact, until these beauties became available.]

It was amazing how easily I could remember exactly where I was when I wrote a certain list, or jotted down a certain quote.  I found the list above written on a whiteboard in the Digital + Media department — I had arrived a few minutes early for my Networked Landscapes elective — obviously remaining after some conversation in a previous class. It struck me as thought-provoking then, and it did so again last night. What were the people in that room trying to figure out? Was it adapted from some existing text, or did the participants generate it?

[I like to think that I could make these into mad libs for the contemporary artist or designer. Fill in the blanks with some relevant issues, and presto! Instant thesis topic. The fine folks of Make, Do would approve, I think.]

Its taken me a while to be able to sit down and write a summary about finishing grad school, but here it is in a nutshell: I’m done! :) That convoluted thing you see above was the title, and basically it meant that I was thinking about how technology changes the way we build archives and tell stories. I intend to sit down and write a more thoughtful reflection on the whole process, but for now what I want to do is just show a few pictures.

An MFA at RISD is signified by a few tangible outputs:

• participating in a school-wide show of MFA graduates, [the setup was blogged here]
• giving a 20-minute presentation (followed by 35 minutes of q&a) regarding my work over the last three years, [see below]
• building a website documenting the whole process, [check it out here]
• and writing a book documenting the whole process. [coming soon]

Thesis Presentations

Our individual presentations were spread out over two days, and took place in a gallery on the first floor of our building. There’s usually 20–50 people in attendance, including three external critics, the department heads, and each person’s three thesis advisors.

Its a public thesis defense in the sense that anyone in the RISD or design community is welcome, but it is closed to family and friends and the general public. It makes sense — an external critic can’t exactly tell you the weak spots in your work if your dear Grannie is in the front row, now can he? It sounds intense, but in reality the gathering is fairly informal — people will call out during your talk, or ask you to repeat something — and there is a lot of clapping and cheering at the end.

The atmosphere in my presentation was supportive and engaged, and the discussion afterwards was less about defending my work, and more a jumping off point for debate about the field of graphic design itself.

Here’s my setup the night before I presented:

Waiting to answer questions about my thesis after the presentation.

All the presentations are given in a little side room, and then people spill out into the gallery to talk about the work while looking at as many examples as possible. Its a great way of seeing everything you’ve done amassed in one space, and is quite overwhelming! I’ve collected photos I took of some of my classmates during their reviews:

I’m still looking for people who took photos of my own presentation, but I have no doubt they exist somewhere. I also have a 5 GB video of the entire thing, which I will compress at some point and put online.

My memory of the whole day is pretty much a blur, but I do think my presentation went really well. Mostly I was just excited to be finished! At the end of the day, I walked away with three copies of the first page of my thesis book (the only part of my thesis book that actually existed at that point), each signed by the external critics, the department heads, my thesis advisors, and my writing coach:

No erasing those signatures — its official.

At which point we went off to the Red Fez to celebrate! :)

We installed our work in the convention center yesterday, part of a series of preparations in anticipation of the Graduate Thesis show that will open this Thursday. I set up a camera and tripod and made a couple makeshift videos of the event!

Well, its finally Spring Break here at RISD. My last spring break for the foreseeable future, unless I become a professor somewhere! Thesis year people are “strongly encouraged” to stay in town for the week, which really means there will be hell to pay if we attempt to go somewhere warm or sunny. So I’m just working like I always do…

but perhaps at a more leisurely pace. Also, a much higher proportion of my time is spent in pajama pants! Which is as it should be, really.