First week and Design Camp!
This week has been exhausting. First, the week before.
Day two of classes brought Principles of Photography and English II. Both sounded pretty awesome, but Photography scares the hell out of me. In English, we wrote a “diagnosis” essay, where he wanted to see where we were at. The prompt was to write one-page paper about a vacation and choose a song lyric that goes along with it. I wrote about the time I learned how to surf, ate pizza, and learned how to play rugby all in one day. My lyrics were “How much better, how much better could my life get?” from the Mountain Goats’ Jenny.
Wednesday like Monday, but opposite. Instead of Art & Design Concepts, I had Corporate ID. Erika had a meeting, and Clay was back at school. Corporate ID is full of awesome friends and is going to be a blast.
I borrowed a cage from the camera for the first time ever, and I was really nervous. The film cameras the school has don’t have any kind of case, so I was really paranoid about damaging it and getting in trouble. Rachel, the gal who checked it out for me, helped me out and allowed me to store it there. I only needed to reserve it in advance for class the next day.
At home, I worked on a poster for AIGA meetings, which went well until Illustrator crashed and I had been stupid and hadn’t saved for 2 hours. Later that night, I tried printing to my USB keyboard instead of my USB printer for about 20 minutes before realizing my mistake.
The second day of T-day classes was rough. I nodded off a bit, and my photography teacher was there to wake me up. I think it’ll be fine, though. I think.
English II is probably going to be my favorite GenEd class at Ai. I just have this feeling about it. Courteau has a Latin phrase-of-the-day thing, and due to the setup of the new off-site classrooms, his “whiteboard” was a bunch of huge post-it notes, essentailly. What he didn’t realize after writing his phrase and asking us to attempt to decipher it, he had already done that on another sheet for the previous class. When three hands went up immediately, he was a little suspect. He must have realized it, because he walked over to the post-it and tore it down with an “Aw, shit…”
I got to hang out with my Jess a bunch, and that was real nice. After this, it was time to crack down. We had a quick AIGA meeting, and I raced home to pack and raced back to the school. Seth, Jake, and I were off to Nisswa, MN for AIGA Design Camp 2006.
This was my first time driving up north, and for that matter, anywhere near that length. My recklessness shone bright, with the complete lack of other cars on the highway later at night. Up in Breezy Point, where we were staying, we picked up a pizza from the Commander. I love that place.
Settling into the Towle’s place, we ate our pizza and watched some TV. The Towle’s place is real nice- a lot nicer than the JR condo I stayed at last year. We got to bed pretty early, despite having one of the latest mornings of the weekend ahead of us.
Friday marked the first day of Design Camp. We woke up, suffered the sulfurous stench of the shower, and made our way to “Nisshwa” and the Grand View Lodge. I checked in with Amanda, my old friend who was actually with my group last year. She was on the committee this year. Right off the bat, we met another student, Anthony. He’s from Century and was there alone.
Taking him under our wing for a while, we had lunch at Zorbaz right away. Delicious food there, albeit the spelling of EVERY SINGLE WORD with a “Z” is a little over-the-top.
The opening ceremonies were short, and we went right into the first speaker: Peter Buchanan-Smith. We arrived a little late, so we were in the back row in the non-comfy seats. The first part of PBS’ speech was about how great he thought the Yellow Pages were. There was more, about how we’re always stopping and starting.
My first workshop is where camp really started to come together for me. The title was “Play at Work” It was run by an improv instructor at some improv school somewhere. He was pretty awesome, and this was a great place to start meeting new people. We played a game called “Zip, Zap, Zop” which, while it sounds kind of lame, turned out to be hilariously fun. I was out pretty quick due to my inability to clap and aim. Slow reaction time, I suppose.
Later that day, was the Business Networking Expo. This is where all the vendors/sponsors lined the main conference room with booths and gave us free things. Duffey Paper’s booth alone filled a nice paper bag we got. I won two $96 Vikings tickets, if anyone wants to buy them from me for cheaper.
The night was pretty crazy. Beginning with karaoke in the bar, featuring plenty of hilariously bad drunk singers, along with a few really talented folks. Even our first speaker, PBS, performed a song. I found Amanda and Jake, and we talked about all kinds of Ai-related stuff.
I met a nice lady from Rochester at the bon fire whose name escapes me (I’m terrible at this, and will hopefully improve by next year). She was cool, and we ended up talking and hanging out more later, too. Amanda got down to the fire, and we talked for a bit more about what she’s been up to since high school. I had no idea she was working for the Star Tribune! Someone put some kind of copper or something to make the fire burn pretty colors.
Back at the bar, I find Seth and Jake. Jake apparently hit it off with PBS, and Seth even met the President and Vice President of the AIGA Minnesota chapter outside the bathrooms. It’s awesome to see how we were having such a good time.
The ride back to the condo was really late. I think it must’ve been around 2am. Jake kept talking about how glad he was to have met PBS, and how he’s giving him his business card the next day. It was pretty funny. At the condo, we had a good time reflecting on the first day, and checking out all the cool swag we got from the Expo. By the time we were finished with this, it was probably 3 or 3:30. This was going to hurt us.
Saturday was, as expected, rough waking up. Having difficulty finding a mirror outside the bathroom, I wished I had a MacBook for the sake of using it as a mirror in the morning. Funny. I was really groggy, and had a really crummy shower. There’s no water pressure, and the water stinks. It’s really a whole lot more awful that I can possibly explain.
Another solo student, this time a gal from Stout, joined us. Brian Gunderson replaced Keith Anderson as our first speaker for the day. I don’t think he was very well prepared, as it was probably a very last-minute thing, but I think he did well from what I was conscious of. He mentioned how his creative process was chaotic. I also caught something about him working with Song Airline’s design direction. This was a really awesome connection for me to make, as I watched a documentary in Critical Thinking last quarter that had a big bit on Song.
The first workshop for the day was another playing workshop. Children at Play wasn’t exactly what I expected. I think the guy running the workshop was possibly high and spoke in a very passive tone. I ended up playing charades, my team consisting of a guy I met from Red Wing and a guy who does graphics for NPR (including The Current!) We kicked some butt, considering the weird material we got. We had to mime the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life”, which was ridiculous!
Design Olympics came up next on the agenda, and that was a lot of fun. I showed off my athletic prowess in capture the flag, as our little team kicked some butt with brains over braun. We lured them all into our jail for the win!
Another workshop next, this time Wood Type. Bill Moran, who hosted a lecture I attended on the history of type previously, was leading. This was a really fun workshop, except the fumes of the paint gave me a massive headache and made me uncontrollably dizzy. I had to step outside and sit in the leaves for a bit.
Announcements and the third speaker came after the workshop, but I forget the relevance of the announcements. I have some feeling that I’m missing something here, but I’ll just jump to the speaker.
John Hamilton is the Manager of Design at Steelcase. Steelcase is the world’s largest furniture manufacturer! While industrial design isn’t quite graphic design, I think the messages he sent across definitely applied. Many things stood out in his speech, including the prompts he had for his employees that weren’t jobs, but explorations. I can explain this better in person. I guess their crew has meals together sometimes, and they all give each other sharpie tattoos. This sounded like lots of fun!
Two quotes from the presentation I really enjoyed:
“Fail early, and fail often.”
“Make design your life, and make life your design.”
For dinner, we went into Pequot. After discovering the Sibley Station was way-packed, we tried our luck at the only other restaurant in town, Pestellos. Essentially a bit of a hick bar, the food was actually pretty good. I was in a bit of a hurry, though, because up next was PANTONE BINGO!
On the way back into camp, we ran into the gal from Stout and her mom, and we headed into the makeshift bingo hall. While I personally liked the way bingo was setup last year, with people sprawled out across the rec room, this wasn’t too bad. I won an ear-mounted spy laser light or something wacky. It’s pretty sweet, and you should probably be jealous.
Down at the pavilion, a hoedown was underway! The Devil’s Flying Machine, a pretty-rad bluegrass band was playing. Coca Cola was free at the bar, and everything was nice. People were dancing (I even joined in for a bit, as scary as that sounds) and merry. Seeing Mr. Moran doing his own little dance about ten feet away from the rest of the action was quite a scene. I don’t think I saw him much after that, the rest of the night.
Back in the rec room, I found my Rochester buddies playing some table tennis, which I learned is definitely not my sport. I redeemed myself with some air hockey hat trickery.
The room next door was the bar, where I found my buddies hanging out. Jake was performing with a small crowd of people watching. Jake’s a drag queen and does this kind of thing, I guess. I had a nice chat with Seth about camp and music. A cute gal with glasses was such a terrible dancer it almost made her not cute.
Just as the audience was increasing and people were having a good time, the party was over. The jukebox shut off and people shuffled out. Down on the beach, the party was still roaring. We spent a short while there before returning to the condo for another reflections and ideas talk. It was super late, again.
Sunday arrived with ease. We packed all of our goodies into the recently reorganized trunk of my Altima, and headed south. The trunk’s reorganization had to have been some kind of engineering super feat, because we had a lot of crap to take home, not to mention the junk already in it.
We arrived slightly early, which allowed us front row seats. Our friends from Rochester joined us up front. The introduction of the last day included reading off the prize winners from the various raffles going on over the weekend. One of the ladies from Rochester won an iPod, and I ended up winning Adobe Creative Suite 2!
Paul Sahre, the final speaker, was pretty rad. His presentation began with a video his brother secretly took of him working. Picture a guy sitting at a computer with headphones, working normally. I guess it was of pretty great length (an hour or three, I forget), but we only saw approximately the first five minutes.
Sahre also mentioned a little side project he was running called “Spreadin’ the Luv” I really like the idea of this, releasing the luv as Creative Commons and doing this all out of his own pocket. Add him on Myspace and send him your mailing address to get free stickers and spread the luv yourself!
That was it, for Design Camp 2006. We gave our long goodbyes to our friends from Rochester, Red Wing, and elsewhere. Seth picked up a tank of gas (which was really awesome of him), and we headed back to sweet civilization. What I hadn’t mentioned yet, was my itchy, bloodshot eyes that were killing me. The allergies or something had gotten out of hand, and I was glad to be on my way back.
I dropped the guys off at their respective drop-off points, and returned home. How glorious it was. Exhausted as all hell, I wasn’t done for the weekend. Gaustad came over and helped me work on my photography assignment. Our best idea for motion was to attach stuffed animals and animal cut-outs to power tools.
That’s the end of the week before last, and I’ll have to catch up with last week another time- tomorrow maybe. More importantly, and to come full circle, it’s time to stress out about another photography assignment. Aghhh!
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