Tennessee Trip - Late August

This is terrible that I'm just now chronicling this, but this all happened at the end of August before Michelle went off to school. This was what we did for our Summer vacation—Michelle's last Summer vacation, as students think about it, anyway.

My Aunt lives in Knoxville, and it's beautiful country out there, so, being what we are (nature aficionados), we decided that was the trip for us.

We flew into Nashville and got started right away. My aunt met us there.

Our first stop was the Nashville Zoo—that's our thing, we go to a zoo every time we go on vacation. As far as this particular one goes, it's a nice zoo in that it's very shady and a lot of the habitats are big... other than that, I'd just say it's a competent zoo. And they have this bird that probably weighed a good thirty or forty pounds, and it was terrifying. It would jump from branch to branch and the tree would creak under its weight. A horrible, horrible bird, I say.

After the Zoo, we went and investigated some night life. It was pretty awesome; no cover, tons of live music. It was a good time.

We found a place that was pretty much just like Howl at the Moon here in Houston, except there were only like six people there. It was pretty awesome, actually.

We went out the next day and got to visit Hatch Show Print, which was pretty special to me.

We also got to see a Dale Chihuly Exhibit. No pictures to share on that, but it was really nice work.

We made it to Knoxville that night, and in the morning: Zip Lining.

Super Awesome.

The last day was rafting. The water was not as rough as I was hoping, so the trip wasn't very eventful for the most part, but it did have its moments.

We hiked a little bit and swam in some freezing water (invigorating!), but no further pics.

Final thing worth a mention: we had a layover at Atlanta International Airport. MAN, that place was crazy.

Washington.

I recently got the chance to check out Washington DC. I wasn't able to stay long, but I got to see some of the hits, if for no other reason than to say I did.

Driving in, it's a really interesting sight: on one side of the freeway, there are highrise condos, and on the other side, just a ways down, there's a factory, smokestacks and all, still in use. But the condos are so nice. And there's so many of them. I don't think I've ever seen so many nice buildings in one place. It's a recurring theme in that town.

The other big take-away from the trip is the sheer gravity of that town: this is where our country of 300 million people is managed. Depending on how strongly you believe in our federal system, I realize that statement is up for some debate, but still. Even just the fact that an attempt is being made is nothing to scoff at.

I walked the town with my younger sister. We stopped first at the Capitol. The security presence was very... conspicuous. The guy in the picture above was not the only guard with an assault rifle at the capitol. The capitol, by the way, when you get up close to it, seems a bit more like a palace than you'd think. It's weird. I mean, I would never want the place to be a dump, or ugly in anyway, but there's something about the fountains and gardens and windows and balconies that make it seem like much less of a place of business and more like a place of leisure. Anyway.

Places like that, like the capitol and a couple other buildings, if the public is allowed in at all, they use a separate entrance from the one the important people use. I was not there during the morning rush hour or anything, but I was a little thrown off by how inactive a lot of these buildings seemed to be. I just... I guess I thought I'd see people coming in and out at some point. I never did. Not sure what was up with that. I mean, not even a clerk with some documents or even an assistant with some coffee orders. Nothing.

The Library of congress was also done-up big time. The Jefferson branch is mostly like a museum now. Museum-slash-palace, again. There were no books. At first glance, I mean. If you go all the way back, there's a room with a large reading area complete with very nice desks and lined on three walls with very stately old books, as you might see in a movie about a senator (snore), but this room was sealed to the general public. Like so, so much of the town, it seemed.

There were, however, two beautiful books in front of the entrance to that room. On the left, there was a Gutenberg Bible. Huge and wonderful and old. I learned that in order to preserve their copies of this book, they switch them out every few months so that they don't get too much exposure to light. On the other side across from the Gutenberg, there was a completely hand-written Mainz bible. This was even more incredible, because the characters in the bible were so flawless, they looked exactly like those in the Gutenberg. Every letter was completely uniform; no errors in stress, slant, weight, height... nothing. Being a scribe back in the day must have been like being a brain surgeon today. So precise and (I would hope) well-respected.

We encountered the "Old Post Office." I didn't find much out about this structure, except for the fact that it looks a lot like a church or university or something. Now post offices are these squat little buildings. Huts, compared to Ye Olde Poste Office.

It was interesting to see the department of the treasury; it was one of those moments I mentioned where you realize that this town is the center of all policy, good and bad.

Of course we visited the whitehouse, and we saw dudes with assault rifles on the roof. So that's a real thing.

Re: Logos

Creating a logo is hard.

Creating a logo by yourself—without feedback—is way hard.

Creating a logo by yourself, without feedback and without a proper brief is TOO hard.

And yet...

Dear Designers

Everyone, I've discovered this amazing line of paper that I think everyone should know about. It's called Heaven 42 by Scheufelen. It's ultra white. Nothing warm about it; it's stark white, cold white, laboratory white. And it feels amazing. It feels like you can't hurt it. Like it has a sort of innate protection magicked into it—it feels otherworldly. We ran a job at work a while ago, ordered parent sheets and cut it down ourselves. There was scrap left over which would normally be tossed, but I set it aside because I knew we had something special on our hands and I wasn't going to let it go so easily. The scraps were only about three inches wide, so I made note pads out of them. It's been one of the most rewarding decisions of my recent life. I yearnto take notes on this paper—100 # coated text weight. I should explain that it's not a gloss coat (obviously not, you couldn't write on it then), it's a soft smooth coating that just... oh, you just want to touch it and you want to draw on it and doodle on it with just about anything you can get your hands on. It's fine for pencil; it's marvelous for pen. I recently bought a new technical pen—.35— and when I combined the two, it was... there's no other word for it. Heaven.

Heaven 42, I reckon.

I'm getting a little tired of high speed cameras. Slow motion has always been awesome, of course, and it really came into its own as film and editing quality went way up in the last ten years or so. But once Mythbusters got a hold of it...well there just wasn't much for it from that point on. There's a show on Discovery called Time Warp that consists almost exclusively of high speed cinematography. It's gotten to be a bit much.

Hopefully it'll go out of style soon... and then come back in style around the time I'm ready to make my first commercial or music video or something.

Zach Kimmel: Graphic Designer/Window Washer

Indeed, I can design a business card for you, I can give your website a facelift, and I can do a complete communications overhaul for your company.

I also am discovering that I clean a mean window.

Oh my, I do hope this is all building towards something.

Michelle and I are watching The Sopranos together, start to finish. I'd never even seen a whole episode up until last night. Four episodes deep, I immediately see what the fuss was about. I'm so sorry I missed it while it was a thing. Better late than never, though.

Did you know that there are people out there who start their own businesses? I mean, from nothing. Like, before they decided to create the business, the shop, the store, the firm, whatever it is, before that decision, there was nothing there. How can a person do that? How does a person figure out that there is a need for a service that is not being met or met properly, and how does a person make other people understand that they are being left wanting?

And then, once the thing's going, how do you deal with the endless hordes of people who tell you that you're charging too much for your product or service? How do you deal with people who always expect more for less, who don't consider for a moment just how ungodly hard you work just to keep the doors open?

Oh ye downtrodden entrepreneurs of America, my hat is off to you.

George Cayley's Glider

An important step on the road to manned flight, George Cayley's glider is an invention that is too often overlooked in history. Not only did Cayley invent the first manned glider, but he also earned for himself the title of "Father of Aerodynamics." These booklets illustrate the history and science behind the Glider, as well as the many milestones achieved in flight because of this invention.

Guns or Butter

This informational poster illustrates the economic principle known as "guns or butter," which postulates that a government only spends money on one of two things: Defense or Social programs. This poster, designed to be mailed to tax payers, illustrates the magnitude of the US military budget by building big-ticket items out of people. Other information displayed includes amounts of each item in the US arsenal, and other associations with the cost of food aid in relation to populations of various nations, as compared with the cost of military equipment.

2009: A Pessimist's Calendar

A pessimist sees all of the greatest holidays through a very different lens. Where most see joy and time with family, a pessimist sees hassle and headache. This series of postcards chronicles a year through the eyes of a pessimist, illustrated by hand with expressive images and type combined with photography.

This project saw a lot of ups and downs. I'm finally at a point where I'm happy with it, though.

I don't know what my employment situation will be after graduation, now a month away. But I do know that I will at least enjoy a chance to experiment and create on my own terms. I've always been very happy with doing that: just doing things for me.

For a while, you know.

Update, Regular-type. And eggs.

I've been craving scrambled eggs lately, which is something of a rare occurrence for me. I pulled an all-nighter Monday night and ended up fasting completely for some 18 hours. I didn't even equip myself with snacks or anything; I wasn't prepared for a marathon design session. Anyway, when it was done, I had this earth-shattering hankering for an egg-based breakfast. Unfortunately all that was within striking distance was a McDonalds. I told myself it would be fine, eggs are eggs, after all. However, it was not fine. What transpires on McDonald's breakfast menu is a travesty, a crime against breakfast. It may have just been an off day, or that particular location, sure, but it was enough to make me swear off McD's and to almost ruin my day thereafter.

So I still haven't gotten my egg fix. And I think I'll go fix that now.

Too too too much to do in the next three weeks.

The Itch.

And so of course now I'm itching all over to be done with these projects; I'm ready to focus on my portfolio, because I can't wait to have the time and freedom to apply everything I know now to things I designed a year ago. I'm really excited about that first, before graduating.

But I'm incredibly excited about graduating, believe me.

Difficult and frightening.

My best friend gave me this book, How To Be A Graphic Designer Without Losing Your Soul, by Adrian Shaughnessy, and reading it has made me... unsettled, I guess you could say. I've never been over-confident about whether I'd get a job in design once school was out. I thought that perhaps I wouldn't knock it out of the park on the first go, but that I would end up somewhere cool... after a while, at least.

But in this book, I wind up just reading over and over again that the design field is just super-crowded and competitive and that it's incredibly difficult just to get an interview with studios. It's not helping me out, really.