When I think of writing, I think about...

When I think of writing, I think about letters, and words, and sentences, and paragraphs, and papers, and stories, and books, and grammar. As soon as I enter the thought bubble of grammar, I jump into linguistics, and psycholinguistics, and the cultural implications of language.

Writing is a form of language, and language gets me excited.

Language is fascinating. Have you ever been reading a page and stopped, just stopped and thought about the words on the page in front of you? Why does this word blue make me conjure this image? Why does this cluster of words form what I call a sentence? I don’t know about you, but so many why and how questions pop into my head.

I love language, I somewhat enjoy writing because it is a form of language, but it’s only a piece of the overall pie, we can’t forget that.

Webpage Themes

I joined a new department this year at school, the student union publications department, the design committee. My job as a designer is to maintain the aesthetics of the webpage.

はじめに we made a halloween theme, which was pretty cute and such and based on the idea that a student drew the website and slapped it together in class (thus handwritten fonts, torn text sections, cartoon and drawing like decorations). But now we need something more permanent. So, we simply removed the cutesy haunted house silhouette and the other cartoon decorations. (product on left)

Now we need something that is cleaner, less unprofessional, more colorful, and more (coding) flexible.

From top left to right, we have the navigation bar (home, departments, calendar, feedback, useful links), then the upcoming events box on the left, the department ketchup next to that, and the recent articles below that. We've added a news feed box, a video box, and expanded the recent articles to have the same width as the ketchup box. (yet to be posted to the top site)

(Image courtesy Amazon.com)

I love Ito En bottled Green Tea (found in the organic section of the produce aisle). So, I'm brushing my teeth and thinking about an idea for the new design when it dawned on me that we could make a design based on the stripes on the label. (I get a lot of Photoshop epiphanies in the bathroom...) Then I talk to basically my boss and he tells me we're going to try a new code which will place an image over a horizontally repeating pixel. OK, cool, sounds easy. BUT it's not easy at all... Creating the stripes themselves to match our school colors and adding the color gradients and such, also picking the stripe sizes... this is what i've made thus far...

Translation vs. Authorship

Writing in any form is a frustrating experience for me, it can be liberating to throw all the ideas in my head onto a blank screen. But if there are restrictions, self imposed or otherwise, placed on the final product, then it becomes a frustrating process.

In writing class a few weeks ago, it occurred to me that an author can write with his own voice. He doesn’t need to place any restrictions on himself, except if he has an audience, then he has to limit his piece, limit how his thoughts take linguistic form. The idea that he has in his head needs to get communicated properly, or at least to whatever extent he intends it to be conveyed. But that is the only restriction, which I find to be optional (I’ve encountered a lot of texts where the author chose not to convey his message very clearly, much to my upset).


note: this is all I have thus far and is all I will have. I don't have the patience to finish it.