Week 10.3

Little Box of Ideas is a design blog that aims to be a go-to resource for designers. It provides many things to its visitors, including inspiration, articles, interviews with other designers, tutorials, and other resources. It doesn't appear to have any preference for one subject or another, like some of the other blogs I've seen.

LBOI is run by Sneh Roy, a designer who prefers to do logos and character designs. Because of that, the blog has a tendency to focus on logo design. I do wish there was a little more than just that in terms of content, both in the articles and inspiration sections, but she does provide more in the tutorial section. Subjects there range from mixed media, web design, illustration, and Photoshop help. The freebies page also features more than just logo-related posts, so she's branched out in those areas, at least.

I think LBOI is a good place to go to find logo inspiration, as well as articles and interviews with designers. I would prefer if there was a little more to it than just a general focus on logos, but for that niche, it is a good resource. I'd recommend it, especially to anyone interested in logo design.

Week 10.2

This one is another abstract typography piece. For this assignment, I had to create a composition based on a word, "playful." So I ran with it.

Both the colors and typefaces were chosen for their playfeel feel. Bright colors, and a lot of them, are often reminscent of children, and are therefore looked upon as either childish, playful, or both. The glyphs from the chosen typefaces were chosen solely on their shapes: they weren't like the most common typefaces are, that have a very simple, clean aesthetic to them. These typefaces played with the shapes, and I used them because of that.

As for the composition of the piece, I placed each element at the top of the format, at different sizes, and set them apart from each other, all in order to create an airy atmosphere. Playfulness is often related with a carefree attitude, so I wanted to give off that vibe, as well. It came out looking like some of the elements may have been jumping, which I think helps to show off playfulness, as well. I think the theme showed through well, and therefore it is a success.

Week 10.1

This is the stationery for Seolearo Design, a ficticious design firm I created. The colors were a simple enough choice: I wanted to use green because I felt that I had been neglected that color, and the orange went well with it. I didn't want too much orange in it, though, so I kept it to the Os in the logo and extraneous information on the envelope and business card.

One of the biggest issues I had with it was where to place the information for the letterhead and business card. I tried out a few different things for the letterhead, and simply chose the one that looked best. For the business card, I had trouble with the name and other information. I wanted to keep the overall look fairly uniform, though, so I put my name in the green bar in white, the (ficticious) website url under it and to the right. The other information was placed in the bottom left-hand corner simply because that was where it fit the best.

I like the designs, overall. I may have to work on the address' placement on the envelope a little. But it's an easily recognizable set, and it goes well with the firm's brand, so I'm satisfied with how it turned out.

Week 9.3

Nenuno Creative is a design blog full of resources. They advertise as a place for designers to find inspiration.

The website has a lot of different things going for it. They have things such as tutorials for Photoshop, Illustrator, and web design; an interview with a web design firm; and the newly added community news section. The community news posts are done weekly and are based on Nenuno follower-submitted news, and includes articles with tutorials, inspiration, giveaways, design advice, and your regular news about design.

The best thing about Nenuno, in my opinion, is that they aren't restricting themselves to just graphic design in their features and inspiration posts. They do have logos and posters and the like, but they also have photomanipulations, web interfaces, illustrations, and photography. I do wish the site had more articles, though, but since they're trying to be a resource for inspiration, they ccan get away with it.

Week 9.2

This logo was originally an exercise in simplification and stylization for my Digital Illustration class. My chosen animal was a spider, so I drew a spider and worked on top of that, simplifying it and giving it a stylized flair.

Once I had the spider broken down into a logoesque form, I had to choose a company name and colors for the logo. The name was no problem; the Spider Web Design was the first thing that popped into my head, and it stuck. The colors were an issue, though, because I didn't want to use red. I tried many other colors, though, and none of them looked as good on the spider as the red did, so I gave in and used it, making one half of the spider and company name red. The bottom half was left black, because it added weight to the bottom and drew your eye down through the whole logo.

Originally, I wanted to include a spider web in the design, or at least part of one. The teacher dismissed it, though, and I admit that he may have been right. Having that element in the logo may have made it look too busy. As it is now, it's simple and clean, and I think it works fairly well.

Week 9.1

This is the corporate stationery for Amalgamated Industries, Inc. The color scheme is taken from the logo, as is the typeface used for the information.

I wanted to use circles in the stationery designs because it dated back to the Widgco logo, which had a red dot over the I, and the company specifically asked for new designs that reached back into their history. I wanted it to stay simple, too, so I only used one circle that overlaps the page's corner. I kept that as a theme throughout the designs, although the circle moved to the bottom left corner in the business card, rather than the right.

The biggest issue I had with the stationery was with the arrangement of the information. I went through a lot of different stages while trying to figure that out, and eventually came up with this. I'm still a little unsure about the envelope and business card, but I think it works, at least. The letterhead, however, I am happy with.

Week 8.3

MyInkBlog is a site I found a while back, when I was looking through a list of design resources. It's a blog that brags about being a resource for "all things design," and I think it's earned the right to say that. Maybe it isn't the most well-known site, but it's far from useless.

A good portion of the posts are tutorials. That's always a good thing, because it can teach designers, young and old, something new. That section isn't necessarily updated at a regular interval, but it has plenty of things to look through and learn.

Besides tutorials, the website has a monthly feature post. They call it "MyInkTrail - Best of the Design community." There are different sections within the post - articles, tutorials, freebies, and featured designs - that are recommended by Andrew Houle, the founder of MyInkBlog. This shows good networking on his part, an interest in staying up-to-date with the design community, and a desire to share that with his readers. That by itself is a very good resource.

And then there's the other articles, ones giving tips on many different design-related subjects. They've got things from CSS tips, to "Lessons from the Lunch Pail," to advertising tips. A good many of these are done by guest writers, and they each have a little gem of advice to offer, some of which we may have heard and some we may not have.

All in all, I think it's a great resource to sift through. There are little posts all over the site that can be very helpful, even if it's just offering advice on one thing or another. It provides the resources to learn something new, and offers inspiration at least once a month. It's a good blog, and I recommend it for anyone in design world.

Week 8.2

This is the logo sheet for AII, or Amalgamated Industries Inc., a fictional company that sells widgets. AII decided, after its hundreth year, to renew its brand identity. They wanted a newer, updated look, but still wanted to reach back into the company's history. The first new design they asked for was a new logo, and they chose the bottom left logo in the sheet.

The colors were chosen as a reminder of their history: Widgco, the company's former name, had a red ball for the dot over the I in their logo. The shape of the A in the new logo is meant to remind them of the same red dot, due to its mostly circular shape. The eye and small leg were added to distinguish the letter as an A, while still trying to retain the feel of the old logo.

The biggest issue I had with this was the placement of "Amalgamated Industries, Inc." I had trouble finding the most natural placement for it, which led to the variations on the logo sheet. It was necessary, however, to ensure that it was recognized as Amalgamated Industries, Inc.; otherwise, there might be confusion if the logo isn't labeled in some places. But once I had those done, the company made the choice of which to use for me. I agree with that decision, too; any other placement of the text looks a little awkward, so I believe they chose the best design offered.

Week 8.1

This was another abstract typography composition done for the same project as this one. It was one of my first attempts at a typographic piece, abstract or not.

One of the general rules of design is to use, at most, three typefaces. But since I'd interpreted this project as needing to be abstract, I didn't think that applied. So I just went ahead and scrolled through an unbelievable amount of typefaces - I hadn't realized I had so many until this project - until I found one I thought might work. I worked primarily out of Illustrator's Glyphs window, because I wasn't looking for letters. I was looking for shapes, and there were many more interesting shapes in the typefaces than just the letters and numbers, and I wanted to make sure I kept the option open.

In keeping with the overall theme I used for the six pieces of this project, I wanted just a splash of color amongst the stark black and white; this time, it was a golden yellow. I didn't choose that color for this particular composition for any real reason other than the fact that I hadn't used it yet. Looking at it now, I think the choice worked, because it's just a little bit of color that doesn't overload anything. The two grays I used were implemented in the same way as before - to give a little bit of flow between the color and the black.

I think it turned out pretty well; in my opinion, it's one of my better compositions for this project. I didn't run into many problems with it either, other than the occasional struggle of where to place an element. I think it's a nice piece, and I hope any others that see it feel the same.

Week 7.3

While digging through some more blogs, I found one called Design Muse that focuses on package design. I know that the work in this blog doesn't belong to its maintainer, Casey, but she has a link to her portfolio availabe if someone wants to see it, along with information on how to contact her for freelance work. She seems to be more interested in showing off good package design than showing off her own work.

She always makes some comments about the package designs she posts, which effectively explains what the design is for, who created it, and what she likes about it. If you can't figure it out from just the images themselves or the subject line, her comments are all you need to look for.

Casey, I think, is trying to stay true to her blog's name. She's hoping to inspire others through the package designs she posts and talks about, hence the name "Muse," and I think she does a good job with it. I know I saw some of the designs on that blgo and were impressed, and thereby inspired to use what styles I like in the future. It's a pretty good place to look, for anyone looking to get into package design. Design Muse features a lot of nice designs of all sorts, so I know it'll be the first place I go for pack design inspiration, if and when I need it.

Week 7.2

A variant on the last poster, this was another advertisement for a fake art exhibition for South University students. The parameters were the same in terms of color, meaning I could only use red and black, but the elements had to have a deconstructive style to them.

The result turned out like this, with the elements thrown on the page in a legible but not entirely organized manner. I tried to keep a loose sense of hierarchy, however, mostly in the size of each design element, despite them being tossed around at all sorts of angles while still being upright enough to read properly. I was trying to give it the feeling that everything was falling, as if every element would eventually meet with the black pile at the bottom.

Because it was supposed to seem like it was falling, there needed to be an airy atmosphere to it. Thus, all of the white space throughout the poster. That's also why I chose a simple sans serif typeface: so it would be easy to read even though the text was rotated. The four black circles, despite being the dreaded even number that designers are told to veer away from, vary in size and were meant as a simple design element to add some interest. The size variation, however, helps to convery the sense of falling, especially next to the diagonal, also size-variant text. It helps the reader's eye flow down, through the exhibition information, and eventually to the pile at the bottom.

The biggest problems I had with this poster were the circles and the pile of text. For the circles, the issue was where to place them, and what size to make each. That was solved by simple experimentation and the wish to help the eye flow better. As for the pile of text, well... that was just plain tedious. That alone probably took longer than the rest of the poster.

I think the extra time was worth it, though. It may be pretty simple, but I do think that this is one of my nicer pieces, possibly because it's simple. It has a nice flow, and I think it does give a good appearance of falling, so I'm pleased with how it turned out.

Week 7.1

This poster was designed for a fictional art exhibition for South University students. The parameters were for all elements to be diagonal, and the only colors used to be red and black.

I wanted to go for a elegant, almost airy look when I was making it. So I chose a very light sans serif for most of the text, and spaced each of the letters out in order to let them breath a little better. The first letters of the headlines were given a scripty typeface to add an extra bit of interest and keep in with the elegant atmosphere I was trying to achieve.

The red section at the bottom was meant to draw the eye down from the headline to the important information for the exhibition. The diagonal arrangement helps with this. The main trouble that I've had with this design is in arranging the elements inside that area, and I still plan to do some more edits on it, around the phone number. But other than that issue, I'm happy with the poster overall. The color scheme I was given worked well for the goal I wanted to acheive, so I haven't felt the need to change it, and the text works nicely, as well. So I'm pleased with how it's turned out.

Week 6.3

A few days ago, while I was looking around an art website, I found a link to Lucas Cobb's design blog. One of the things I noticed immediately while browsing his posts is that he doesn't really show off his work on that site. He has a link to a portfolio, but that isn't an integral part of the blog itself.

What Cobb seems to focus on is giving tips for design, like where to look for help, what trends are popular lately, and just some general guidelines about design-related problems and how to do things. He's got a tag named tutorials, too, but they're less step-by-step instructions than they are a general base to work off of. The front page of the blog also has a news section that gets updated frequently with new articles. Looking through those, they seem pretty helpful too, and show how Cobb has set up a network by linking to other useful design blogs that visitors can explore.

More than anything, Lucas Cobb appears to really want to help other designers out, if he can. He offers his opinions on design problems, as well as some possible solutions, and isn't afraid to direct people elsewhere so they can find what they need. I think his blog is a good resource, for designers of any level, and I know I'll be going back in the future to give it a more thorough look.

Week 6.2

When I was working on this project, the first thing I decided on was the color. I wanted to use green, since I don't often in my work. Once I found the green that I wanted, I chose an analagous color scheme that I wanted to evolve as the sequence progressed, gracefully gaining more colors and thereby enhancing the flow that the project was aiming for.

As for the actual composition of the pieces, I wanted one dominant feature in each frame - the green letterform - with each of the other, smaller elements having a different color. Only four elements didn't change: the large green letterform, the yellow-green ball, the small yellow ball, and the orange "Cheerio" that gave the set its name (I can thank my Typography class for that one). I was aiming for a sense of continuity when I chose to do that, and I think it came across well.

The big problem I had with this project was the last five of the ten frames (not pictured here). I guess I fell into a sort of creative slump at that point, because four of those compositions - the ones I designed last - came off as crowded after the first five, which had a generous use of negative space. That wasn't the case with frames 6-9, and because I'm so unhappy with how those turned out, I'm planning on editing them to fit better into the series. And since I already know what the problem is and have an idea on how to fix it, I don't feel the need to showcase them until I'm satisfied with the results.

Week 6.1

In Digital Layout, we were supposed to be practicing how to use grids. This particular project was a website design to be done with the help of a hierarchal grid.

In all honesty, I didn't actually use a grid, but I did keep the parameters of the assignment in mind. Because it was a website, the navigation and logo were important elements, so I placed them at the top so they would be found easily. I also put a navigation bar at the bottom, in case the website involved scrolling below the fold. That way, a visitor wouldn't have to go back to the top to go to another page.

The page name is another important factor, so I made it one of the bigger elements with a noticable color: red. The subtitles were a little smaller, and in gray, so they would stand out but wouldn't overwhelm the rest of the information.

The biggest problem I had was with the images. Since the website was for an art gallery, I assumed they'd have a preview of work from their current exhibition, but I didn't want it to break up the text or take away from it at all. My solution was to have a small marquee where only part of the artists' work was displayed instead of the whole image. And since I didn't want to show off too much on the website, I stopped at three works per artist and put some details of the exhibition to the side of it.

Overall, I tried to give the design a Modernist style, since the gallery was for modern art. That, and the fact that I wanted the website clean and easy to navigate, was the reason behind the color scheme, and the sans serif fonts I chose. I think I managed it, so I'm glad how it came out.

Week 5.3

Recently, I came across the blog of a graphic designer named Rebecca Agra. It's in Portuguese, so I had to use a translator, but as I looked over it, I found, more often than not, designs that where linked from elsewhere and are probably not hers. A couple of the posts I found did belong to her, but most of her designs were left in the portfolio section.

In looking over them, I think her skills show best in the logos she's created. She has very nice color choices, and while some of the logos are very simple, others are a little more involved. They all work well on a logo sheet, but I have to wonder how some of the more complicated ones would fare when scaled down. The simple designs Agra shows off don't have that problem, however - particularly the Eureka Comunicacao logo.

It also looks like she isn't bad with print design, either. The good sense of color found in the logos continues in this area, ranging from package design to fliers to book covers. Her style comes across clearly here: simplistic, but easily functional, and extremely colorful.

One thing I do think Agra needs to work on is her illustration skills. That is the first section on the portfolio page of her blog, and it isn't all that impressive to me. Her color choice is still aesthetically pleasing overall. The illustrations themselves, however, look a bit plain in comparison to her logo and print designs, as well as some of her photomanipulations. It looks like she's still getting used to illustration, but I think if she does more in that area, she'll get better in time.

Overall, I like her blog. One thing I would like to see more of is her own work in the blog section, rather than a slew of other designers' work. But as it is, it shows that she's keeping an eye on the graphic design community at large, and that's always a good thing to do. And because Agra does that, I learned something new: April 27 is World Graphic Design Day. I hadn't known there was such an observance, and I thought that was an interesting tidbit to find.

Week 5.2

Oasis Chispeante is an imaginary eco-resort in Costa Rica, inspired by a class. This is the corporate stationary it uses.

Since the place is a resort, I wanted the logo to be something that could represent the country without being too exotic. So I used a Guaria Morada, the national flower of Costa Rica, made purple to match its natural color. The resort name was made green to further the plant idea.

For the stationary, however, the logo by itself looked too plain. So while I was doing the business cards, I decided to try a watermark effect. I thought it came out looking nice, and while I wasn't sure about taking that element into other parts of the stationary, it was better than nothing. So I tried it, and I think it turned out well enough.

The only thing I'm not really sure about at this point is the second business card with silver. I liked the look of the silver with the purple of the flower, but since the logo is actually green, it seems like it might be a little out of place. But for now, my justification for it is that executives, or just the CEO, get special business cards in a different color.

Week 5.1

This is probably the most useless set of cards you will ever play with.

It's a model I made in Maya for an assignment, which was to make something using simple shapes. A lot of the artists I follow on another website have ongoing projects of designing playing cards, so I decided to follow their lead and do some of my own. I only did the aces, however, because they are the most obvious cards in a deck.

The transparency was inspired by models I've seen around art websites that have dielectric materials. I really liked the look of it, so I wanted to try something with transparency myself. At the time, though, I had no idea what dielectric materials were, so I couldn't make the cards exactly as I wanted; I just messed with the transparency and hoped for the best. I'll probably go back at some point and change it, just to see how it looks.

I don't think that not knowing about that material hinders the model, though. As it is now, it has a an interesting texture and even some nice little reflections in it that I'm not sure I could manage as easily with a dielectric material. So I am satisfied with how it turned out, but I'm still open to experimenting with and improving it.

Week 4.2

A friend of mine has enjoyed jewelry making for as long as I've known her. Recently, she's gotten into fashion design, too, and has been talking about possibly opening an online shop to sell her creations. And since she knows I'm a designer, she asked me to make a logo for her last summer.

"Nachtstern" is the name she chose. Purple was the color I chose, though that decision was based heavily on my friend's color preferences. I didn't want to pull a color out of the air and end up with one she hated, and since I knew purple was one of her favorite colors, I used it. It helped that cool colors emphasized the name a little, since it means "night star." The fact that her specialty lies in making jewelry is what prompted the necklace idea. The star pendant was also taken from the name Nachtstern.

I had a few more ideas than just this that I showed her, of course, but this one was the best, in my opinion. And judging by the positive reaction she had to it, it was a success.

Week 4.1

One of my earlier projects, this poster was done in my third year of graphic design, while I was still in high school. The idea was to make a poster in Adobe Illustrator for the annual polo event held in Camden.

The first thing that came to mind when I was given the project was class and sophistication, something I associate with polo. That's what led me to use black, red, and gray as a color scheme, as well as the typefaces. But I didn't want to leave it at just words; that would have been boring and gotten no attention, even in passing. Even so, I didn't want to use any photographs. So I ended up going with a flat illustration of polo players instead, with one of them a bleed. I hoped that would give the impression that he was running onto the page that way, and add a little dynamicism to it, too.

Looking at it now, some of the typefaces could stand to be changed. But for one of my only remaining projects from my first three years in graphic design, I like to to think it isn't too bad.

Week 3.2

This poster is an ad done in InDesign for the Modern Art Gallery's Plus 3 Exhibition. I remember this one taking a lot of playing around to get something acceptable. We were supposed to be using a design grid to do it, specifically the modular grid.

Anyway, the color scheme was something I chose early on, but didn't actually implement until later. Since the design was for the Modern Art Gallery, and modern art has connotations of red and black to me, those are the colors I wanted to use, with a few spots of gray to temper it a little. The typefaces were also chosen for the modern aesthetic, partly because they were sans serifs, and partly because I wanted emphasis on the artists. Because of that, I gave the artists a heavier look than the rest of the information to draw more attention to them.

The biggest problem I remember having was getting the names of the artists to fit on the poster. Originally, I didn't have them tilted, nor did I have them intersecting. After some time of failing to get it work horizontally or vertically, I got frustrated and tilted and intersected them, possibly throwing out the grid in the process. I'd never liked the grid idea anyway; I just wanted the project to work. And it helped, much to my relief. After that, all I had to do was toy with the arrangement of the other components and add the color and design elements to the poster, and it became what it is now.

Week 3.1

Before I started college, I used to do minimal web design for myself and some friends - but that didn't entail designing websites from scratch so much as designing layouts for existing websites. Even so, it gave me enough experience in HTML and CSS to not be completely lost when I had to take web design as a class.

This is my first "real" website design, I guess you could say. It was made in Photoshop CS3 as a project for which I chose the Downtown Dance Studio. My concept for it was fairly simple: it was a dance studio - and one for ballet, if the provided logo was any indication - so I went for elegance. The main color for the website was taken from the logo; I didn't think that, were this for a real client, deviating too far would go over too well, and I knew I could make it work. I ran into one problem with using that color, however; it was too flat and plain to be used as a background for the text boxes and navigation bar. So I tried using a gradient overlay, and got the effect it has now, which was much more to my liking.

As for the text itself, I still wanted to keep true to the client's already existing identity. I seached through serif typefaces to find one similar to the logo's, and I actually ended up finding the same one. In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have used that typeface for the body text and kept it to the headers and navigation links. I might change that in the future for better readability.

I didn't have that many problems with the design. The main thing that bothered me was that there was a lot of white space between each component that made it look... oddly spaced, I guess? I'm not sure what led me to try borders, but once I did, it made it look much less like the parts of the site were floating. But there was still a bit of white space that I didn't like, so I made some decorations out of dashed lines to fill it up. That made everything look more unified, and completed the design.

Week 2.2

My mafia spider illustration was done in Adobe Illustrator (surprise, surprise). The assignment was to make a character illustration out of a spider, and the idea for it came out of a conversation with some friends - we were joking about mafia stories at the time. And since spiders aren't generally viewed as pleasant creatures, and the mafia isn't necessarily a pleasant group of people, I thought it fit. The colors - black, gray, and red - were chosen because they were both traditional mafia colors and common colors of spiders.

The main problem I had with the illustration was the spider's pose. At first, I had two of his "hands" resting on a couple of guns sitting on the desk, but that looked a little awkward and had no real focus to it. This was solved by making the spider hold up one of the guns and point it at the viewer, which both gave an actual focal point to the illustration and gave it more of a mafia feel.

Week 2.1

This is a model I did of Scrabble pieces created in Maya. The assignment was to make a model that used text in some way. I cycled through a couple different ideas before deciding on this one, and I wanted to try engraving the letters into the pieces because I didn't like the look of mapped text. I tried to get as close to the actual font used on Scrabble pieces as I could, so I used Arial for the engravings. There was really only one reason behind the color choice: green looked the best with the glassy material I wanted to use.

I had one major problem with the model: the point values on the pieces. What I was trying to do was to first engrave the letter, and then engrave them into the piece, and I got that to work once, somehow. Any other time I tried it, it failed. I never actually figured out a solution to that, but the teacher did offer a suggestion that I mean to try out.

The shadows were a bit of an issue too, but if the model can fool people into thinking the pieces are real instead of computer generated, I'm happy with it.

Week 1.2

I've always liked typography. The thing is, most of what I've seen from that style of art used complete words and sentences, and sometimes even built a picture. I haven't seen much in the way of abstract typography pieces. But with so many different typefaces to choose from, I thought it could look nice, if it was done right.

So I tried my hand at it. I actually had no idea where to start, but all it took was a little playing around with letterforms and glyphs, and then I had this little composition. What I like most about it is that there's just a small amount of color. That's a style I have always enjoyed seeing, and I don't like leaving something devoid of at least a touch of color, so I tried it out. I added in the two grays after that because I didn't want it to be stark black and white and the one bright blue. That can be a hard transition to make sometimes, so I tried to soften it up a little. I like to think I succeeded, but that is, of course, up to the person looking at it.

Week 1.1

This was a poster done for an illustration class last year. The instructions were to create a poster advertising a "modern" product, but to use a vintage illustration style.

I remember having a pretty hard time just coming up with an idea. I couldn't think of what product I should use - I just knew I didn't want to use a computer or a phone. The problem was, every time I tried to think about it, those were the two products my mind kept bringing me back to, no matter how much I tried to stray away from it.

So I stopped thinking about it for a while. Not completely, of course; it was still in the back of my mind. I simply refused to concentrate on it while I tried to work on other things. That's what ended up saving me on this project, I think.

When the idea finally hit me, I was sketching. It wasn't meant to be for any project in any class; I was just taking a break to to draw whatever came to mind. Before I knew it, I had the base sketch of the lady in the poster. She gained some headphones, and I briefly considered having those as the product, but they felt too out of focus with her being cut off on the right side. That look didn't do much for the headphones in the way of a spotlight. So I took it a little bit further, and drew what might be connected to them: an MP3 player. It got easier after that. I didn't do much in the way of revising anything from the sketch to the next step, even though I probably should have. All I had to do was just get everything laid out and put in the final touches. I didn't realize it until some time after it was finished, but I'd made a poster I could be proud of.

It's hard not to stress about a project when you're on a tight schedule. I have a big problem with that sometimes. But I think that sort of stress makes it a lot better when you actually get a chance to relax and put the cause of it out of mind for a minute or two. I know my concepts tend to turn out better when I'm not concentrating on and putting all my energy into it. This "Mozart MP3" poster simply brought that to my attention, and I'm still thankful for it.