the making of things
gfish has posted a great narrative of the Mackenzie trip, here. Pictures!
gfish is much better at actually using those combined seven-hundred-odd photos than I am.
I should probably send work a 'Hi, I'm back in the country' email, now that I am back out of the country. In Vancouver for Pride weekend, the Monet to Dalí show at VAM, and fashion cattiness research. Back to work on Monday. Should tell them about the name thing, too... not sure how to do that, but assuming it will be rather less dramatic than telling my parents.
Biked with dymaxion to Little Sister's last night, a bookstore which puts the former Beyond the Closet store to dire shame; obtained fresh infusion of graphical crack; just when we were despairing of finding an open coffeeshop across town from the hotel, we found a 24-hour Blenz location (!) and spent three hours sketching. The Fashion First show illustrated a number of things for me, bookending the rest of everything I've learned this month:
- My intuitive sense of what's classy and appropriate for a show (in the behavior of the MC, never mind the content) is not as broken as I expected. Good taste in the presentation of the design industry must needs starts locally.
- Sturgeon's Law1 is so brutally in effect that it has its own secret police. Looking at fug is very positive reinforcement that one is capable of designing non-fug, and even implementing it. If many people down a manufacturing chain can go along with the decision that that needed to exist, there's no reason to fear making something better. This, I think, is even more true in jewelry, because it is so often cheaply made and a pretty half-assed afterthought.2
1 Approximately: "90% of everything is crap." The 90% is recursive.
2 I'm not that good of a clothes designer. More of a pattern-fixer for same, at the moment - but I've been sketching jewelry designs for years upon years, more as a brainstem function than a vocational choice. Only just now, in the last eight-or-so months, realizing that it's genuinely okay to care about design in that space. The question is finally not "Should I pay any attention at all to that domain?" but "Should this individual piece get made?"
----
today: art!, research, maybe more. Must resist the desire to walk around Hermès wearing Coolmax.
gfish is much better at actually using those combined seven-hundred-odd photos than I am.
I should probably send work a 'Hi, I'm back in the country' email, now that I am back out of the country. In Vancouver for Pride weekend, the Monet to Dalí show at VAM, and fashion cattiness research. Back to work on Monday. Should tell them about the name thing, too... not sure how to do that, but assuming it will be rather less dramatic than telling my parents.
Biked with dymaxion to Little Sister's last night, a bookstore which puts the former Beyond the Closet store to dire shame; obtained fresh infusion of graphical crack; just when we were despairing of finding an open coffeeshop across town from the hotel, we found a 24-hour Blenz location (!) and spent three hours sketching. The Fashion First show illustrated a number of things for me, bookending the rest of everything I've learned this month:
- My intuitive sense of what's classy and appropriate for a show (in the behavior of the MC, never mind the content) is not as broken as I expected. Good taste in the presentation of the design industry must needs starts locally.
- Sturgeon's Law1 is so brutally in effect that it has its own secret police. Looking at fug is very positive reinforcement that one is capable of designing non-fug, and even implementing it. If many people down a manufacturing chain can go along with the decision that that needed to exist, there's no reason to fear making something better. This, I think, is even more true in jewelry, because it is so often cheaply made and a pretty half-assed afterthought.2
1 Approximately: "90% of everything is crap." The 90% is recursive.
2 I'm not that good of a clothes designer. More of a pattern-fixer for same, at the moment - but I've been sketching jewelry designs for years upon years, more as a brainstem function than a vocational choice. Only just now, in the last eight-or-so months, realizing that it's genuinely okay to care about design in that space. The question is finally not "Should I pay any attention at all to that domain?" but "Should this individual piece get made?"
----
today: art!, research, maybe more. Must resist the desire to walk around Hermès wearing Coolmax.