a modern piece of glass work

feeling so irritated for some reason.

tough monday. or was it tuesday. i cried again at my first therapy session after a year. i need some help.

yes it was tough monday. i went for a brisk walk after dinner, but i feel super tired. i cried about how single i felt. but yet i was doing nothing about it. i want to meet someone that i am crazy about who feels crazy about me.

i did some interesting designs this week and i've been doing well at work, as always. i received some feedback about being more confident. i feel like writing about stuff. but i dont' feel like anymore.

https://eyeondesign.aiga.org/the-era-of-nonchalant-web-design-is-here/

funny ipod comments circa 2001

mall zine as a place of community building, escape

“This site is updated daily,” read one of the site’s GIFs. There were eleven different font styles and it didn’t use a  grid. It looked active and iterative, a site that reflected the lively nature of a suburban high school experience: not too precious and a little campy, routine but exciting, like your first time driving to the mall.  celebration of web 2.0’s do-it-yourself ethos, and a culmination of online web trends of the time, stylistically similar to Redwood’s own website. It was on MySpace that I first became aware that a website’s design could be punk rock.

Artist Olia Lialina refers to this style as Prof Dr. Style. In her piece, Lialina outlines some of the visual patterns that unify old academic websites and their relevance historically. These websites, she writes, tell the story of the web. “They are actual and timeless. I mean you can open them in Mosaic 1.0 and it will not crash,” she wrote. While each site has unifying factors, the site owners were constantly reimagining what the web should look like, for themselves. others are needlessly stylized in a familiar way.

Limited by the technology of the time, the early internet was vibrant and iterative. Academic sites highlighted both individual and communal experiences in a shared and public digital landscape.

But by stripping imagery from its in-situ context, it becomes difficult to grasp the conceptual rationale behind their formal appearance.

Reference images are considered only by era, by subject, or by setting, rather than as a unified amalgamation of ideas and aesthetics.

You’ve previously worked as a Creative Director at Getty Images, Nokia and now Microsoft. Could you talk a bit about the divide between your experimental style and the type of work you do for large companies?

When I left college in 1990, I was lucky enough to be able to do experimental work that paid the bills (just about). Then after Ray Gun ended in late ”98, I had done what I dreamt of doing from a career standpoint and I was at a crossroads.

The wall packed tight with Fella’s 11×17-inch flyers, organized on a grid, seized his attention immediately. They were visually spectacular. They were highly original—the product of a unique mentality. And they were utterly obsessive. Art is always obsessive. It’s the relentlessness of an entirely self-chosen enterprise that helps to set the activity apart as “art.”

I begin an essay about Ed Fella by emphasizing his art side because there is no way to appreciate fully what he was doing in these pieces without addressing both art and design.

Fella used his double-sided, hand-made flyers, which he printed at a local shop, as a space for pursuing his own concerns as a self-styled “exit-level designer.” By this he meant he had reached a point in his design career where he was acting as his own “client,” and no longer had to worry about the routine aspects of communication.

Except he chose not to for the most part and kept the outcome at graphic design scale on a modest printed sheet, which he then gave away to anyone who wanted a copy.

He identifies now and always as a graphic designer. While his later output continues to offer a profound challenge to constrained thinking about what graphic communication can be, he made no attempt to direct this work to a wider audience for art. I asked him recently whether he had a list of his exhibitions. Even the most rudimentary artist’s catalog provides a list; artists build their careers by exhibition. “Sorry to say, I have never kept any comprehensive lists of anything—lectures, exhibitions, publications, awards, etc.,” he replied. “Unlike artists. The typical mindset of a graphic designer from my era: ‘Who could ever possibly want or need it?’” Fella enjoyed two design careers. There was no pressing need for art scene endorsement. (Graphic design as identity vs artist mindset)

https://only-the-questions.glitch.me/

I thought it was my fault. I am just not good at relationships, I told myself. I am emotionally unavailable. I am not a sexual person. If I just tried harder, then I would find a boyfriend.

It wasn’t until I was with another woman that I realized, for the first time in my life, I wasn’t pretending anymore.

I no longer strategize the way I talk, dress or act to attract my partner. I don’t have to drag myself onto dates or pretend to enjoy myself.