Stefan Hayden

AIGA’s Fresh Dialogue: Friendly Fire, which was their last event for the year and is the first AIGA event I have helped run, was a blast. Escorted by another TCNJer we quick found our selves out of place as all the SVA students seemed very well acquainted with the AIGA staff. Every one was very friendly and we ended up talking with some great people.

As an event it was fairly well planned. They had about 20 volunteers for an event that CUB would have only have had about 10. Mark Byron was well in control and used his large volunteer staff to good effect. He was able to cover a lot of bases that CUB would not have bother with like people at alternate entrances directing people to the correct one.

James Victore moderated and he is very colorful character but did not come across as the best moderator. At times he seemed unprepared though this maybe partly due to the odd nature of the talk. The 62 and the Crye Association (no site?) were not graphic design companies but more along the lines of industrial designers. I am all for the holistic approach to learning about design but James had a hard time bringing the conversation back to design. There was also little talk between the two groups till them end (at which point I had to go back up to get ready to sell books) about how The 62 kind of hates what the Crye Association does (a lot of military design).

Though it was less then a dialog and more of two sets of speakers talking in turn it was really interesting to see the work that both groups were doing. It nice to just be awear what others are doing with in the same industry as you even if you don’t have an interest in doing it your self.

Afterwards a lot of us went down to a very nice bar and hung out with the other volunteers, AIGA professional staff, and the presenters themselves. I’m not really a bar person but I had a lot of fun and talked to some amazing people including Robyn Jordan, one of the AIGA staff, who I got to talk a lot about the AIGA organization and its inner workings.

I had so much fun and really look forward to being involved in more organization up in Boston. Who says graduating from college is a bad thing? Not me.

No matter who complains you always have shadows of doubt. This, on top of the fact that design by committee never seems like a good idea, was why I was worried when 32 graphic designers had to agree on a theme for our Senior Portfolio Review (SPR). The meetings were a mess with no clear direction, leaders thrust into power with out any kind of training, and no clear deadline to be finnished by. I knew two things, our only hope was to pick 1 person to design it and let them work and I did not want it to be me*. Rachel had a great idea and direction of using CMYK because it is the core of what we use** and it would nicely show off the full color postcards we were printing. For all of our sake she was chosen after some preliminary designs and we were all very happy with the results.

Until we sent it all out and two TCNJ alumni had not so nice words about our SPR theme of CMYK. One of our best teachers assured that the one student was horrible and to not listen to a word he says and the other was so insignificant that he could not even remember her***. We all knew what he said to assure us was true and got angry at the alumni instead of depressed for ourselves. We pushed on and the SRP was an amazing success.

While it didn’t bother us the shadows of doubt had lingered in the back of our minds. No one wanted to be called a hack as you were graduating. We were never fully vindicated till I found an article from LogoLounge.com about Fifteen trends in logo design for 2005. On page three I was shocked to find CMKY as a design trend! Even if you disagree with the trend I am beyond happy to know we were with the times with out consciously thinking about what other people where doing. We did what felt right and it worked.

I’m not recommending being trendy but it’s hard to deny that graphic design is very close to fashion design and trends are important in both. It’s a fine line to walk and I’m happy that it seems our senior class walked it very well.

• CUB, ResLife and Campus Life we’re gonna be the death of me. ** though being the odd one out with web I used RGB. ** He then went crazy himself and started psychoanalyzing the people the email was CCed to.

I’m kinda hot and istead of be original I’ve decided to just ReBlog:

Now available at Rhizome: a Raw RSS feed! http://rhizome.org/syndicate/raw.rss Right now this feed re-posts the entire text as posted originally. So it's suitable for reading, reposting, etc., etc. There are now three separate ways to track the discussion on Raw: by email, by web, and by RSS syndication feed. I set the feed to track the last 40 items, which right now means it's a sort of big feed, at 87k. Of course with Raw's traffic the way it is, the resulting feed only tracks about the last 36 hours worth of posts. I'm considering excerpting some of the bigger posts, and having more posts per feed, if 36 hours isn't enough ... anyway, let me know if you're using it and have suggestions for it. This is one of those things that we couldn't have done three weeks ago. I hope y'all find it useful. Francis Hwang Director of Technology Rhizome.org

While gMapTrack still seems kinda of buggy it really looks like it will be as full featured as I had mentioned previously. I really wish google has taken the initiative and added this functionality themselves. It would have blended in nicely with their Google Account system they have going. I’m extra interested in this technology because, as of now, google maps does not list my house on their maps and for the google fanatic I am it’s a little embarrassing.

gMapTrack seems to still be rolling out alot of features (they say this coming Monday) and so I’ll restrain from giving it a review using hReview that’s I’ve been itching to use. I’m looking forward to tagging the world. I would love this to integrate with hCard (my current obsession) and let me up load my contacts and then view their location on the map.

I was looking for a good address book and didn’t really come across anything, especially for the PC. Searching more what I did find was the Apple Address Book and the vCard standard for the MAC and very simple Address book for the PC. From there the only good program I seemed to find was A-Book which seems really nice though it is $30 for the full version and the trial is a timed 30 day trial. The vCard wikipedia post was lacking in much information as well.

I found a Mozilla project for a vCard extension but it seems to have been mostly abandoned. I think it would be a great extension to run right along side the Mozilla Calendar extension (as well as the standalone sunbird).

With iCalendar starting to do some really interesting things on the internet with the ability to subscribe and publish online and hReview looking to do some cool things in the near future I really want something to happen with vCard.