Middle Way

Definition of eight winds:

Eight conditions that prevent people from advancing along the right path to enlightenment. According to The Treatise on the Stage of Buddhahood Sutra--Bandhuprabha's work that was translated into Chinese by Hsüan-tsang--the eight winds are prosperity, decline, disgrace, honor, praise, censure, suffering, and pleasure. People are often swayed either by their attachment to prosperity, honor, praise, and pleasure (collectively known as "four favorites" or "four favorable winds"), or by their aversion to decline, disgrace, censure, and suffering ("four dislikes" or "four adverse winds"). (The Soka Gakkai Dictionary of Buddhism 八風 definition)

For most of my young adult life, I have been using this as a guide to keeping calm almost. To me, being calm doesn't mean keeping myself from expressing excitement, joy, or agitation at all. It is more be able to keep my negative emotions under wraps and only expressing the uplifting, endorphin promoting emotions. But that isn't to say I'm necessarily a positive person, because many things I say, think, and feel are in fact pessimistic in nature. 

This concept has also been instrumental in reminding myself not to sweat the small things, something that can be difficult because I'm a perfectionist by nature, and slightly obsessive compulsive. If someone doesn't like my work, that's ok, I can fix it. If I don't get a call back for that interesting job opening, that's quite alright too, everything happens for a reason. If anything, this idea lets me be more relaxed about my life while still focused on my goals and not beat myself up every chance I get. This idea is so important to me, that I inked it on myself.

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...