littlestar

we're packing and things are busy. :)

still... i've been catching up on some of my trades that i've fallen behind on. i've enjoyed most of them so far... but there is one called "chi" i have to talk about further.

i've read a lot of graphic novels and lots of different stories, mostly independent, so a lot of different flavors right?

this is the first time i've read one that is so apparently drug-induced. i mean... some of the cat stories are cute, but so much of it looks like what someone would produce off of dropping acid or smoking pot or both that it was a little hard for me to bear.

that and the stories are largely content-free. but yeah... very strange stuff. i think i may want to sell/donate it or something.

Posted by littlestar at 12:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

saw shrek 2 with my sister.

it was pretty entertaining even if it did feel a lot thinner as far as material went.

there was also the overwhelming feeling that they were trying too hard to be funny.

and maybe i'm just getting old, but this movie also felt like the pacing was a little fast and snipey.

still... i found parts of it entertaining. but definitely like the first movie better.

Posted by littlestar at 10:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

gmail has forced yahoo to increase their mailbox size... to 2gb, apparently. as for my gooky account, it was increased to 100mb as well. i don't care for extra space, i just want free pop access please. :)

on pronoucing the yummy goodness that is masuman, metamanda's advice:

imagine an asian person trying to pronounce "muslim" and not getting it quite right.

that's just great! :)

Posted by littlestar at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

i saw harry potter 3 after a day of hanging out in sf and consuming insame amounts of sushi.

a few facts, since i may have been confused before:

harry potter 1 - 152 min
harry potter 2 - 161 min
harry potter 3 - 142 min

apparently, those 10 minute difference make a huge difference in how the timing and pacing of a movie will feel. i thought the sorcerer's stone was pretty well paced. the chamber of secrets felt a litlte dragging to me.

i found the third movie to be paced just a little too fast. i didn't care whether they dropped things from the book or not (i agree with metamanda that i don't need to see everything again - how they enter hogwarts, the sorting hat, etc), but it just felt like the individual shots of the movie were truncated by a few seconds that would have greatly aided in providing a sense of variety in the pacing of the movie as well as absorbing and savoring the feel of what a situation might have felt like (the sheer boredom of the experience that is the divination class, the importance of snape assigning werewolves as a topic, the sense of peace harry had in talking to professor lupin). it ended up feeling like everything was rushed and you were being strung from one event to another.

this isn't to say that it wasn't greatly entertaining. i still liked it. it definitely had great moments and highlights of humor and irony. but my main complaint is that i wouldn't have minded another 10 minutes added to that movie to slow down the pace (a couple seconds longer here, a little longer there...). i think those few seconds would have added to the absorption of the story better.

it's the opposite problem of troy, where i thought some of the shots were too long and uninformative.

oh yeah.... the cast won't be changing for at least the fourth movie. for the fifth movie, they already have the same boy for lucious malfoy, so maybe they won't change the characters after all.

i personally think that it would be to the movies' benefit to not change the cast, seeing as how they already have a good chemistry with each other and have a good understanding of their characters. it seems like you could lose greatly in changing them for the sake of something as superficial as age.

after all, they're actors. there have been plenty other situations where people have had to act ages significantly disparate from their actual (90210, where most of the cast was a decade older than the characters they were playing, the oldest being a 31-yr old when the show first started out).

Posted by littlestar at 12:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

if i want friendship....

Aladdin


Who's Your Ideal Disney Guy?
brought to you by Quizilla

if i want stability....

The Beast


Who's Your Ideal Disney Guy?
brought to you by Quizilla

i find it funny that if i want stability, i get the one that is hot-tempered and will give me heartache. =p

but i always did like belle best of all the heroines, anyway.

Posted by littlestar at 12:01 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

i gots presents! :) actually... i got to pick between a pin with the ireland flag on it and a children's book in gaelic.

you take a guess as to what i chose. :)

it's so cool! i have a book with words i can't read, accompanied by cute pictures of little animals making noises that i can't read with litlte pop-up parts.

maybe parakkum's dad might be able to read some of it. i don't remember if he knows gaelic at all. :)

Posted by littlestar at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

so it turns out that most other type classes have about 3 or 4 projects all semester. the ones i've posted on my blog were only the ones that i worked on with illsutrator. there were others that just all done by hand. more towards the beginning, though.

but i think we ended up with something along the lines of 8-9 projects.

this explains my lack of a life this whole semester. :)

but now i am free and i can relax. yay!

Posted by littlestar at 02:57 PM | Permalink

our final project took us 4 weeks. and since i was one of the few people that had a 3D calendar, it took me a lot of time.

this was the one that i mentioned took me at least 150+ hours.

my calendar was a mobile calendar designed for first year parents. each month is in the shape of things related to a baby or something that the parents would need to get in their first year. once side would have the days of the month and some lines for memorable dates/notes and the other side would have some advice or helpful information for the first year of baby's life. in the end, i had wooden dowels tied together to make a mobile. each shape was cut out and backed with illustration board and outlines with colorful pipeliner.

right now, i'm waiting for my teacher to write back with a price since he said he'd buy it from me.

so when looking at these images, remember that they are cut out and pasted and outlined with pipeliner. the mobile's frame was purple with white knobs at the ends and pale green yarn for the connecting wires. the shapes were hung with the same green yarn connected to small wooden clothespins.

update: i forgot to name what all the things were, so i added that now

baby bottle:

pregnancy test (indicating positive):

baby powder:

bib:

intercom:

breast-feeding bra:
(back)

(front - what's cool about the front was that i cut out the little flap parts and had it actually flip open and close with velcro attachments. the lower image is the information you would find when you've opened a flap.)

teething ring:

night light:

knitting yarn and booties:

no spill cup:

diaper (dirty):

baby carriage:

Posted by littlestar at 02:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

we were supposed to pick a subject and use it to make a display typeface.

of course i couldn't resist and used my bunnies. :)

i present to you "lagomorphs," a typeface based on bunnies.

we were required to make 10 letters. maybe i'll feel motivated enough to complete a whole set of typefaces someday. unsure. :)

Posted by littlestar at 02:19 PM | Permalink

each student was assigned a typographer that has greatly influenced the development of typography historically. we were to prepare a 10-15 minutes presenation and to write a 2 paged paper about the typographer and his work. the paper was to have been in the style of the typographer.

however, my typographer apparently isn't a huge people person. so i wasn't able to find his work much. all i knew was that he was a post-modern designer and his theories on how modern designers need to free themselves from the shackels of modernism.

so my paper wasn't in his style but it was post-modernist.

Posted by littlestar at 02:05 PM | Permalink

man... i've managed to delete this entry 3 times. now i'm going to just lay out the facts. no wit, no nothing. :)

the modernists used invisible grids to lay out their information. the text/image would lay flush again the lines. the more columns and rows you have the more flexible your grid is.

our assignment was to have 2 designs each for 3-column, 5-column and 8-column grids. for each of the 6 designs, we were to have:

1. design without size, style and typefaces changes
2. design with size changes
3. design with size, style and typeface changes

there are 18 of them, so brace yourself if you go to the extended entry.

3 columns:

5 columns:

8 columns:

Posted by littlestar at 01:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

for this project, the assignment was to find three different designs done by early modernists, make a copy of what they did and then make your own design using what you learned from copying their designs.

so... the modernists i chose:

1. el lissitzky (two interpretations because my prof didn't like it do much. in the end, he still didn't like it)
2. laszlo moholy-nagy (this interpretation was everyone's favorite)
3. theo van doesburg

once again, the images will be in the extended entry

el lissitzky:

my interpretations:

laszlo moholy-nagy:

my interpretation:

theo van doesburg:

my interpretation:

Posted by littlestar at 12:05 PM | Permalink

i changed my mind about not putting up the page layouts.

the classic book layout uses the golden mean, a greek method of creating a "beautiful and balanced" layout of the page. this was used in rebellion against the old parchment layouts of illuminated texts, where parchment was so valuable that every available space was filled with text. the classic book layout was used with the invention of the printing press and paper. since there were no standard paper sizes, the golden mean allows to have a standard way of laying out pages on all different paper sizes.

you'll notice that a lot of these pages seem to be wasting space. that's sort of the point. "we're rich now and can afford these trifles." this kind of layout was used pretty much until the modernists came out. if you look at some of the older books (i've been a book copyrighted 1913 in the sj library), they still use this layout.

my assignment was to come up with two different paper sizes and design four continuous sheets. for each paper size:

1. no change in text style (like bold, italics, etc) and no change in text size
2. only change in text size
3. change in size and style

the two paper sizes i chose were 7"x7" and 6"x8". you have to pretend that you took a xacto knife and cut what you see down the center vertically and horizontally.

7"x7"

6"x8"

Posted by littlestar at 11:17 AM | Permalink

my type projects. i will separate them by project so that they are easier to load page by page. the images will be in the extended entry so that it's not obnoxious to people that don't want to actually see all of the images or for those on a slow connection. :)

all the typography projects were done on illustrator.

unless people really want me to, i won't put the more boring projects up (like handwritten calligraphy, page layouts in classic/modernist styles). especially since those amount to about 34 pages worth of stuff.

this particular project was to use the letters of the words themselves to demonstrate the concepts. the idea has to fit in 4"x4" squares. two images per word, one using the letters more symbolically and the other visually. the words were:

scale
depth of field
movement
texture
negative space
alignment

Posted by littlestar at 11:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

of my two bunnies, beau is the relaxed one and stormy is the spazzy one. stormy is also the really scary smart one.

yesterday, my genius bunny figured out how the closet doors open. she's too small to have enough weight to push it open, but she was pushing against the sides of the closet door (my closet doors are sliding doors) in a manner that would easily open the door if she were bigger.

after numerous times of failure, she wandered off to lie down.

it makes me wonder if she was evaluating the results of the day:

"hmmm.... does this mean that the doors do not work the way i think they do? or do i have to apply more force? if x=3.5 lb bunny and y=door then a times b squared, identity cubed times the multiple of z times x should be..."

Posted by littlestar at 09:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

a belated congratulations to will and tonya. i left a comment on their actual post about it, but i think it's time to have a homage post on my blog as well. :)

what's funny is that just a week ago, i had a conversation with my friend fumi and mike where we were discussing who would be next to get married. fumi was nudging me about how it's time for me and parakkum to go all permanent... but i thought that it would be will and tonya. :)

i'm happy to know that it's true and best wishes for their future together. :)

if ken did have a pool on who would go next, i think i might have won, especially since we had this talk literally a week before will proposed. :)

happiness to all. :)

Posted by littlestar at 06:37 PM | Permalink

i've had the opportunity (imperative?) to drive a chevy colorado for the last couple days. i have to say that it just added to my decision to never drive a suv. the best perks were:

cd player
ability to accelerate
"smart" functions (auto light on/off/adjustment, auto music shut-off, auto unlock/lock of doors)

but i really disliked how floaty everythings was, how loosy-goosy the handling is compared to a sedan and i really really really disliked how i could feel pretty much everything on the road.

why the opportunity? it was time to do a intermediate service on my car and since it's old, it had lots of things to clean and such and costed me $530 for everything. but at least i got a free car wash out of it and a loaner for two days. :)

my mom's wondering if it's time for me to get a newer car or take my dad's now that my car keeps needing things to be replaced or cleaned. still... i like my car and it drives great. :)

Posted by littlestar at 06:32 PM | Permalink