This is why I rarely do graphic design work for free.

Art fart

I'm coining that phrase right now. How many times have you had an amazingly creative idea come to mind at the most inappropriate time? For me this usually happens when I'm driving. Since I commute to school, I spend roughly 20 hours each week driving back and forth which gives me a lot of time to think about things. It's during my commute that I end up having a lot of brilliant ideas that come to mind, most of them come out of nowhere. Unfortunately, by the time I get home I usually forget what I was thinking about or I only remember bits and pieces. This happens more often than I would like so I thought of a name for the occurrence: art fart. See the handy definition I put together below.

I find that I experience a lot of art farts pertaining to graphic design. I have so much going on every day on top of multiple design projects for school, etc., that I tend to have a lot of fleeting ideas at the same time. By the time I have a chance to sit down and work with these rogue ideas, I can't remember what they were entirely, thus, art fart. Think of it kind of like a brain fart but more creative and such. Have you experienced anything like this? Does this make any sense to you? How often do you experience art farts? How do you cope? Feedback is more than welcome.

Type.

I Thought I would share a little bit of what I have been doing in class these first few weeks... Here is some typography work I did using Illustrator. The quality isn't the greatest after converting to jpeg format but you get the idea.

Here are some monograms I made using my initials in Helvetica manipulated in Illustrator:

Next I did some tinkering with the words "disruption" and "expansion" to show literal meaning, some more successful than others:

Lastly, some more word form work using the word "Typography". We needed to choose a word pertaining to the class and typography seemed like an obvious choice but proved to be quite difficult to execute. The word itself is already literal in regard to its definition but I think I managed to come up with some fun variations:

FOETOES

The above photos are some of my recent random shots (my friend's EVO, Chicago traffic, downtown Minneapolis, Chicago skyline) using my Nikon D60. I have always had a passion for photography and often received some nice compliments on my pictures from back in the day. Now that I finally have a professional camera I have been wanting to take pictures more and more. I am still learning the essentials as well as some cool tricks thanks to my buddy Drew who has been pumping out some serious photography work for awhile now. I think it is more fun to learn as I go first hand like this rather than in a classroom but I think I might take a photography class down the road, couldn't hurt right? I just want to learn more technical stuff, I think I have always had an eye for good shots/angles/points of interest, etc. but now I want to take things further. Do any of you out there enjoy taking pictures? What are your favorite things to shoot/what motivates you? I think photography is such a powerful and fun art form. I can't wait to bust out the D60 in Europe this fall!

Art Robots

I could see myself spending a lot of time with these things. It is interesting to see how advanced technology is becoming and how we can use it in so many uncommon ways that might not come to mind at first.