I’m off to enjoy some much-needed family time down in lovely Lake Charles, LA this week. Here’s to the land of lagniappe, boudin, and Community Coffee!

This week I fulfilled a long-time goal of mine, which was to volunteer with the group that puts on Shakespeare on the Common every summer here in Boston. The closest I had gotten up til now had been to sign up for Commonwealth Shakespeare Company newsletter during one particularly cold day last winter, but promptly forgot about it. Then last week the call went out for volunteers, and here was this incredibly easy sign-up form for me to fill out! At work, no less — I do love me a social transaction that I can accomplish entirely online.

So this Wednesday (and Thursday) I left work a little early, hiked up Joy Street to the Common, received a very stylish “STAFF” t-shirt, and was promptly put to work handing out programs and collecting donations.

They were long nights — two hours of working, three hours of show, and then another hour of hauling chairs and breaking down tents — but satisfying ones. It brought back memories of heading to Shakespeare in the Park with my family as a kid, and of hanging out behind the scenes at various ArtFest events.

This summer’s production of All’s Well that Ends Well is one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known and more problematic plays in that it resolves itself in a rather murky way (or not at all, depending on your point of view). I had no previous experience with it, so I came to both the plot and the production with fresh eyes. I’m looking forward to sitting in the audience next week and experiencing the whole things from start to finish!*

I was volunteering for both a preview performance and opening night, and it was clear some of the kinks were still being worked out. It was particularly neat to watch the cast and crew after the first show, working through scenes on stage in a completely empty Common.

The one thing I did observe as a volunteer were the impressive preparations of the audience prior to the show. While several Park Rangers were on hand to make sure no one was enjoying wine on the Common, people set up the most amazing picnic feasts in the hours leading up to the show. One group had a full dining table set up, complete with cutlery and glassware!

* I won’t be going quite that far, but I am hoping to pull together something cool for when I meet up with the lovely Cris to watch a performance next week.

Back from another lovely week on the Cape. Food was eaten, beaches were explored, sandcastles were built, fireworks were watched, bubbles were chased, s’mores were cooked, conversations were had, naps were taken, and books were read. We did the same things we’ve always done, and it was exactly right.

Well, almost. We’re still a little weird.

The annual trek down to the Cape is upon us! I shot three rolls of 120mm film on my Holga last summer, and then heartlessly allowed them languish at my old roommate’s place until only a few months ago. It was such a treat to open them up when it was still cold and rainy here in Boston!

The weather that week was warm, humid, and cloudy cloudy cloudy.

Best shower in the world.

Tiny pants. :)

I did actually vacation with other human beings, fyi. But I saved those kind of pics for my — gasp! — Hipstomatic. I did break down a few times:

We also had a rogue photographer in the neighborhood, because I obviously didn’t take this one:

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.

About a year ago I took a little drive with a friend of mine up to New Hampshire. Our goal of visiting a local farmer’s market turned out to be ill-fated, but our impromptu visit to a local used bookstore was not! I immediately fell in love with this beauty, for obvious reasons:

Unfortunately that trip also included a tour of Red Hook Brewery, and on the way home my lovely purchase came into untimely contact with a growler full of Oatmeal Stout. The beer was a total loss, but the book acquired notes of leather and coffee grounds. :)

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.

There are times in my life when I feel a lot like this scene in Amelie. I call them my Expansion Phases. Two weeks along in my first semester of teaching, they’ve been happening basically every Friday night as am packing up to take the train home. Its not necessarily a comfortable feeling, having your brain expand like that. All those new synapses forming, all that expansion of my world, and I’m usually due for several Advil and a quiet weekend to feel normal again.

Add in three dinners with some of my absolute favorite people, and the joy of finally getting to meet 5 pounds and 12 ounces of pure perfection, and this time I might need two weekends to recover. :)

In celebration of Texas Independence Day, I went looking for our original currency. Images from Crutchfield’s Currency.

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.