Here’s a great demo of what combining a few simple things like what the new HTML5 offers, a little jQuery, and bit of Processing can do for you. Totally trippy. Totally awesome.

I’m excited to start seeing more sites (and create a few myself) start to tastefully implement some of these new supported features. And hopefully it won’t be overkill as when jQuery first hit the scene. As a creator of websites and a user of these technologies, it’s always exciting to have more tools available to work with. I’m not the type to use every available tool on a project just because I can, it’s just nice to have a robust toolset from which to utilize the most appropriate tool for the job.

Whomever said high school were the best years of your life was obviously one of the people that peaked in high school and never did anything during rest of their life. High school, to me, was more or less one big blur of 4 years. Nothing really changed much at all those 4 years, I never really matured all that much, mentally or physically. I went to class, and I played a lot of video games, and then I graduated.

I didn’t bother applying to colleges until January of my senior year, about 5 months from graduation. I applied to a few colleges and was accepted into those which I had remembered to send in the applications. In the end, I decided to go to Michigan State University, which I was to attend for 2 years, from September 2004 to May 2006. I wanted to do something with graphic design and the web, and as such I was to major in Telecommunications, Information Studies, and Media in the Digital Media Art & Technology program. One hell of a long department title, we usually just shortened it to Telecom and DMAT respectively.

During my time at MSU I did a lot of walking. I met some great people. I got my first taste of tear gas from a post-basketball loss riot in Cedar Village. I began to find myself, and find out what I really wanted to do for my career and with my life. I started to get bored with classes, I was never learning anything in the classes in my major. And I was not liking the classes I was taking in the Studio Art department, which I was going to declare as a second major.

A younger a more unkempt me.

I decided to transfer. I was going to leave behind (almost) all the things and people I’d come to know and switch to a new school. The new beginning that people commonly write about in tales of journeys or self-discovery.

October 2005 was the month I sent in my application to the University of Michigan. By December I believe, I had been accepted for the Fall 2006 semester. With my transfer I decided to switch majors, mostly because the University of Michigan didn’t have a comparable DMAT program. That semester I became an official student in the School of Art & Design.

Michigan was a great school to attend. The shear amount of resources available to me was just amazing, from studios to libraries to rec facilities. It is a bit sad that I wasn’t able to make use of all those available resources. I found that the professors I had, all the faculty as well, in addition to the staff and studio coordinators were more personable and easy to form relationships with than those I had encountered at MSU. At Michigan I was able to explore other media pretty well, mostly due to their curriculum in which students were more or less forced to experience a wide range of media in their first two years at school.

I found I really liked bronze casting, which I was able to learn to do at the School of Art & Design.

Even though Michigan didn’t have exactly what I was looking for as far as classes went, I still managed to get what I wanted out of my time there. In high school I knew I wasn’t going to learn everything I needed no matter where I went to college, and most of the valuable things I’d learn would be things I did in my own time. I think it’s because of that very reason that I’m in the position I am now, and that I’m as self directed as I am. A nice thing about the School of Art & Design is that I managed to find a core group of students that were really into graphic design and didn’t want to stop learning, even if that meant going outside of normal school hours to learn more about design. It was for that reason that I joined up with the University of Michigan AIGA Student Chapter, which was organized and led by School of Art & Design students. This student organization is one that I would, a year later, become the vice president, and president a year after that. AIGA was a good experience to learn to talk to and lead a group.

There were a few negatives to the School of Art & Design as with any higher learning program in this country. One of those being that while there, I was subjected to some irregularity of the curriculum. Meaning that the curriculum had changed about twice in roughly five years, once while I was a student. The turbulence in the curriculum led to some confusion on the part of the professors on how and what they should be teaching. One of the most unfortunate things about the first curriculum change was that the number of graphic design classes there took a nose dive. The unfortunate thing about the second curriculum change was that it screwed up my requirements for graduation, partly because I was a transfer student, which is not something you want to worry about after 4 years in with 2 semesters till graduation. I believe the curriculum has finally stabilized for the meantime and there probably won’t be too many shakeups for a while.

The biggest of the big A&D follies in my opinion was the lack of graphic design related classes; there were about 3 a semester, 6 a year, and they were the same each year. After those 6 classes, you had taken what all they had to offer. The strange thing about the small amount of design classes is that the demand for these classes was very high, they’d fill up before any other class when scheduling started each semester. The demand was high but the offerings were low, low, low. The few available graphic design professors were stretched thin. Very unfortunate. In fact, the administrative avoidance to anything graphic design was that at one point the word “design” was not allowed in any class title, whatsoever, and this came down from the dean of the School of Art & Design.

Another negative of the school – and most likely true of every school out there – was that pretty much every class was taught to the lowest common denominator, save for one class, a persuasive visual communication class. That class was actually pretty cool in the way it was organized; it was split up into 4 small groups by experience and skill levels, so that each group was almost like it’s own little self-contained class. Otherwise every other class was taught, more or less, with the expectation that most of the students knew nothing about what the professor had to teach. Again, that complaint isn’t so much directed at the University of Michigan School of Art & Design, but more at how education is practiced in our country.

The School of Art & Design was by no means a technical school. They didn’t teach all, most, or really any of the ins and outs of the commonly used creative software, that kinda thing was mostly left up to the student to learn themselves. But they did teach up a healthy amount of creative thinking and problem solving skills. It’s a fair trade. But still, it would have been nice to have some more technical skills taught to level the playing field in some of the classes and bring up the level of expectation in others.

Not to dwell on negatives, the best thing in my opinion about the School of Art & Design was the senior-level capstone course called Integrative Project. The class is a year-long course, one that accounts for half of the credit hours needed to be a full-time student, and most of the hours one would spend a week on school work, it was almost like having a full-time job just in itself. The class affords each student with their own studio space; less than a A&D graduate student would get, but big enough, clocking in at about 8 foot by 8 foot. Over the year, each student is able to work very independently and really spend lots of time on conceptualization, refinement, and production. Time management skill were critical for this class as it was very easy to get behind schedule significantly as a number of students did. This class is where you could tell who is going to be able to hack it in the creative industry. To my knowledge very few undergrad programs in art and design offer anything like this.

My studio – a complete mess – one week before the final show.

To this point college has been the best time of my life. Though, I’d imagine the most current part of my life will always be the best time of my life; things will just keep getting better.

The first half of my senior year here at the University of Michigan’s School of Art & Design is done and over. With half the year gone, half of the time I have to work on my IP project is gone as well. Three months of conceptualizing, discussion, and testing over, with just under three months left to finish more conceptualizing, more testing, and all my actual production work.

So, Where Am I At?

The concept I started with some months ago was to do general infographic work using a variety of data sets as the information I was to transform, then make some sort of fine art print of the resulting illustration using a medium such as woodblock, screen print, or what have you. Now, my concept has transformed from visualizing data in general, to visualizing a more specific sort of data, music. More specifically my concept is that I am exploring the connection between music itself, and static and moving visualizations of music. I had originally wanted to not visualize just music because I thought I might be pigeonholing myself into only showing in the end, to my eventual viewers, that I’m only able to visualize one type of data source. I thought it would be a better portfolio project if I showed how I can effectively visualize all sorts of data and show how flexible I am in the work I can do as an potential employee.

At this point I have three illustrations done on the digital side of things, three videos done, one complete set of woodblocks cut, one quarter of the blocks are cut for the second illustration, the silk screens for the third are ready and waiting to be covered in emulsion and exposed. The ideas for the fourth and fifth illustrations and pseudocode for the programs is in my mind ready executed.

What Went Right?

I am super glad I decided to visualize just music. It’s super fun; I like working the programming, I like turning music I like into illustrations, and as much as I like working on the computer, I love doing the hands on, fine art side of things. It’s even been suggested by one of my GSI’s that I could pigeonhole myself more, perhaps by doing something like sticking to one particular musical genre. Honestly, there’s too much music out there that I want to work on to just limit myself to one genre.

What Went Wrong?

Time management, plain and simple. Personally, compared to the rest of my class I’ve been doing pretty well with keeping up with my projected timeline. Sometimes though I’d get stuck on one problem and just spend hours more time on it than I should have and it all adds up, little by little. Combine my programmers-block with the time it takes to cut actual woodblocks by hand, and the time it takes to learn how to work RhinoCAM and all the in’s and out’s of the Roland 4-axis mill and you’ve got yourself quite a large chunk of time, not exactly wasted, but spent on the little things. In my endeavor to learn how to cut my second blocks on the Roland mill I wasted around eight square feet of MDF and something like 12 working hours making mistakes and tweaking the feeds/speeds and bit sizes, but I eventually got it right.

Another thing that went wrong is that I thought a little too grandiose in the beginning of the year with regards to what I’d be able to create in what is actually such a short amount of time. I had originally wanted to create at least eight final prints and two bronze sculptures. It doesn’t sound like to much to me, but in actuality, it is a lot of work.

Endgame

I think in the end I’m going to have five or six final prints, each with a video that will play beneath the print (with headphones to listen to the music) to show the relationship between the music, the moving visual representation of the music, and the static visual representation of the music. There will also be a kiosk that will have videos of each song rendered out using all the different visualizers so the viewer can see how the visualization changes with the various different musical inputs.

I’m very excited to continue with my project this next semester.

Senior year for the University of Michigan Art & Design students means one hell of a long project. A year-long (really only 7-8 months) project that is supposed to be more or less the culmination of the 4 years students spend at the university. Myself, this is my 5th year in college, but only my third at the University of Michigan. The current curriculum is that of a very conceptual nature; “thinking outside the box” type stuff. This can be beneficial, but all the conceptual stuff comes at the expense of very little technical, skill focused classes. Unfortunate, but a reality. Those that care make do and learn what they need to know outside of class.

The year-long project I mentioned above is for our IP class, that’s Integrative Project for the unknowing. My initial ideas for my project were based off my main interests: continue developing my analog photoblog, do some infographics work, do something using code, furniture design, packaging, or something with computer generated designs.

I’ve spent my time here working in all variety of mediums; wood, plastic, ink, paint, steel, bronze, pixels, code, etcetera, etcetera, and now my final year is in it’s beginning stages. I was pretty set on continuing with my photoblog before the year began, but once things got underway I started to think about all the things I won’t have access to after graduation, mainly the printmaking studio and the sculpture/metals studio. I had to make a decision. I could either do something that I can do anytime or something that I have limited access to; easy choice.

With that said, my project can basically be summed up as a combination of new media processes and traditional, fine art finishings. What I’m envisioning as my final project is a series of prints, and a few bronze sculptures. The prints will be data visualizations from any sort of data set, a few from music, perhaps some sort of census data or what have you. The data will be processed with code that I write, in programs like Processing or Flash, then finalized as a digital illustration which I will take to a 4-axis mill to cut into some wood blocks, and finally I’ll use those blocks to pull some woodblock prints. I might also do some intaglio printmaking and screenprinting, but we’ll see about that. The bronze sculpture will be based on waveform from some sort of audio source. I plan on making two sculptures, one utilizing a laser cutter and the other using rapid-prototyping.

The final result of the project will be taking new media art which is generally considered “throw away” art, that is to say, it isn’t exactly desired or collectable as you see with the traditional mediums in the fine arts world, and then transforming it into something desirable. Basically taking digital art and giving it more “credibility” by transforming it into “fine art.” With this project I hope to further my knowledge of programming, data visualization, and the boundary between digital art and fine art.

Now is the time to let my inner geek shine through into this world paint, pencils, pigments, and metals.

A little over a year ago I wrote about this cool new technology that was basically a smart, content-aware method for scaling images. Today, this technology has found it’s way into Adobe’s new release of Photoshop in CS4 and it’s cool as all hell.

I’m really looking to getting my hands on a copy of CS4. Also, I predict that we’ll see this feature overused pretty heavily early-on.

10 Cane Rum is tasty rum, no doubt about it. In addition to the flavor, the bottle looks amazing with it’s screened classical engraving-styled front, it’s bright jaunty-angled label, and the embossing of RUM in vertical type on each side gives it that old school bottle feel. The folk that make this really know how to package this sweet golden liquid.

I bought a bottle a while back and it just looked to good that I felt guilty about drinking it. Me being the good little consumer I am, I just had to have a second bottle to sit and look pretty. So I go out and buy another bottle of 10 Cane, get it home, and I’m looking at the design on the front and what do I notice. A bug! A tiny little bug with wings floating around in my rum! I wonder how that got past quality control. Oh well, when I do get around to drinking it, which I will, I won’t sweat it; I figure the alcohol killed all the bacteria, plus I’m not a squeamish complain-y type person either.

UPDATE: Within a scant few hours of writing this I was contacted by one of the brand managers over at Moët Hennessy, the parent company of 10 Cane Rum, apologizing profusely for my unfortunate discovery. The next business day they had a new bottle FedEx’d out to me to replace the one with the fly. Quite unexpected and yet very awesome customer service to compliment the awesome rum. Time for a mojito.

From Draplin Design Co.’s blog.