Oh my goodness. How are we past the first quarter of 2012 already?! More importantly, crap, I'm several weeks behind on my Project Life book, but I've been keeping notes + sketches so I'm not totally lost.
I blame my Manila trip (hahaha) for messing up my schedule, but really, projects just got harder and harder and the weather got cooler therefore I got lazier as the months went by, hahaha! School's ending in a week; all I need to do now are refine all my past projects, prep my final projects for two classes, write five papers and I'm going to be done (and Heathrow-bound!!!).
Ahhh yes Heathrow. My crazy Travel Club has once again talked me into visiting them in London, plus my other travel buddies from back home are going to be there as well. Mini reunion? Bet we're going to be reminiscing our Asian tour from 2007 the whole trip, haha. But these are my favorite people to travel with, and we hope to hit Amsterdam & Paris, so I'm up for a great summer (not to mention I'm swinging by Edinburgh again to visit Chel, I was pretty smitten by that city last time I was there!).
A couple of things that have been happening lately:
1. Austin Kleon in San Francisco!! I was in a terrible rut over the Spring Break working on this project for Visual Literacy class that I super just wanted to throw away, haha. Then I remembered I ordered his book from Amazon. It was an easy read (light + divided into chunks) but super inspiring. Ended up reading it twice and it jumpstarted my creativity (and I ended up redoing the project. My professor said it was good, but commented, "careful of the 11th hour switcheroos." LOL! My ideas really come to me at the last minute...)

Anyway, a couple of days later, found out Austin Kleon was scheduled to have a book tour stop at Flax in SF and absolutely had to go hear him talk + get my book signed. It was awesome. Invited my entire MFA batch but only Charlie went! Well, glad I was able to share the book with one other person :D Anyway, his book was about creativity, main point being that nothing is original, and that as creatives, we should learn to "steal" good ideas from others and make it our own. Pretty interesting insights (and liberating ones, at that).

2. I went to an awesome type workshop with Lucian Balland at Swissnex San Francisco. It was like nothing I've ever done before; we had to cut type out from paper and paste/rearrange it back onto another piece of paper to make posters and copy/scan them. I guess this is how they used to set type in the past; I remember my type teacher talking about how lucky our generation was that everything was easy to set on the computer.

Two realizations from the workshop: if I lived in the '50s, I probably would have flunked out of the Bauhaus; and 2) I need to find more opportunities/situations like these where I'm surrounded by awesome people and scared out of my wits. I don't know if I undestood the brief wrong, but I kept saying I should have reviewed my Swiss style design because I found most of the final posters VERY postmodern. Hahha well, too postmodern for me, little miss I-have-to-fill-up-all-the-space-on-the-page-if-not-it-looks-empty-and-it-all-has-to-make-sense! Others just had posters with a single letter, others two letters, while I struggled with the entire event name (the brief was to create an event poster) since to me, it had to make sense.

Here was our awesome Swiss instructor. Funny, I showed him my work, explained that I felt like it had too little, and he was all, "Really? I was going to say that it is too much." Whoooops. ;)
But then I realized that this is the whole point why I'm here, right? I'm supposed to not know these things. So it was a big blow to the ego but it made me want to go look for more situations/opportunities like this. (Oh, and that girl in the jean jacket mentioned that she was a designer at Chronicle Books. SERIOUSLY. I shamelessly asked her to keep talking about her job. Hello, dream job!)

3. I originally bought these postcards to send out, but I kinda just want to keep them as chips now. (Can someone say poor grad student mode? Haha! These would look great on my wall, too..)

4. Oh, and lookie what's finally out! Speaking of projects taking up my time. Hello, Total Girl Philippines planner 2012-2013! :) This is always a fun project to work on, I'm kind of attached to it (this is my third!). Had an extra hard time this year since I had to write it as well (cheerios to Shiloah for saving me on more than one occassion, haha). Love how it turned out. Love Chichi's fun illustrations!

So cutesy. Shiloah got this great idea of making mini-posters per month, much like the ones we keep pinning and re-pinning on Pinterest. Pretty nice, I have several up on my wall! So glad it's finally out. If you live in Manila, grab a copy for yourself (or a kid you know. Or anyone appreciates cutesy stuff, really).
Back to finishing up projects + rackets + daydreaming + napping + panicking + cleaning my room + finally doing laundry. Can't believe that in a week and four days I'm going to be in effin' London, again, hahaha. Swear, I'm so easy to talk into traveling. (I did work my ass off extra hard these past three months to afford it though—all they had to say was "Paris" and "Prince William". Totally in.)