I don't know what to title blog entries because I write so sparingly that a lot has happened in between each entry. I have to talk about Chloe&rsquo:s 1st birthday, re-design, free lance, job hunting and phones.

Chloe had her first birthday this last month. We didn’t do anything big, just the requisite cake dive and had some friends come over for popsicles and swimming. I think everyone had fun.

If you haven’t looked at my portfolio site in a while you should. I just got done with a re-design. It used to look like my blog does now. I hope to update this soon also.

I have been considering adding a comment feature to this blog so readers can comment on my posts, because I know the large number of my fans love my posts and want to leave comments. Hopefully that itsn’t hard to add on.

The last couple of days I have been doing freelance work with verite. It has been pretty nice to do motion again. I forgot how much I liked that. The last time I did motion design was in Brent Barsons class at BYU. Also I have been interviewing for jobs. I had an interview at Love Communications. I haven’t heard back from any of them yet. Hopefully by the time I write in this again it will be about a new job.

In the next couple of days we are going to get new phones because our current phones are pretty old and barely working. In fact, Jyll’s phone doesn’t work at all. We had to go back to an old phone because hers took a bath. The phone had been placed in the stroller and after swimming at our pool all of the swim stuff was placed on top. Now nothing works on it. Mine doesn’t have that severe of problems but it does have two places that are critical functions that had to be super glued in place.

The last couple of weeks I have been working on a mentored student project at school. It has keep me really busy and away from home a lot. This was hard on all three of us. I hope to be finished with the filming of this project in the next couple of days so we can move on to the editing. I will put up a link to the project website when we finish with everything.

For the mean time, I have come across a little video that I enjoyed.

Graphic Design: The Forgotten Web Standard - Slides in 3 Minutes from Carsonified on Vimeo.

The Lost Tribes of New York City from Carolyn London on Vimeo.

For the most part I am all done with school. I graduated this last thursday from BYU. It is still weird to say that. I feel guilty some of the time, like I should be doing something. It was nice to see family and friends again.

To be completely done I have to finish my BFA project. It is like my thesis project. I have to do a solo art show. It is scheduled for the first two week in June, so my life really didn't get any less busy I just pretended for the weekend. Everything will be done after the show.

See you then.

(HD) A More Perfect Union from Andrew Sloat on Vimeo.

Things have come full circle. I started this blog one year ago. My first entry was the MS Walk last year, and in that year I think I have blogged twenty times maybe.

This year we made t-shirts for the walk and had a lot bigger turn out. It was great. I think everyone had a great time. There were a few more that couldn't make it because of last minute things, but we can get them out next year. The weather held out for us and didn't rain, which was nice.

I have taken all of my photos from the walk a made them available—241mb.

We decided to take photos of Chloe because we had the camera out and the light was good.

It has been a while since I have written. I remembered about this because I recently updated my personal site. And I thought that it would be good for me to update my blog at the same time.

Enough about that, more about the student show. Actually I don’t know much about the student show just that I got accepted and it will be up for two weeks. BYU does the student show every year. It is a juried show of the best work in the visual arts. I submitted my serrv branding project. You can compare mine to the original serrv website.

I just listened to a speech from Frank Abagnale he gave in 2006. I found it fascinating. I would recommend giving it a listen. The speech is available in mp3 and video format.

Legend has it that on September 15, 1956, Design became an honest—to—goodness business. Since then people who design, or manage design, or sell design, have been wondering what they can do to convince decision makers that good design is worth what it costs.

So far as we know, there has never been much question about the value of good design for those of us who make our livings from it. For us the value of good design is sort of a self evident truth, like all men are created equal or, it’s better to be rich and thin, than poor and overweight.

In the outside world, however, things may be different. It has long been rumored that some of the people who run things actually prefer automobiles made in Detroit to those made in West Germany and the architecture of the local Holiday Inn to the Seagrams building.

If these rumors are true, we have a serious problem on our hands. Because this means we are not simply dealing with the need to justify costs to skeptical management. The more difficult problem is that the people who ultimately must sign our checks may believe that good design is, in fact, elitist and unresponsive to what people want.

Of course, there are a few companies that see good design as a central pillar of their business strategy. You know who they are. It shows. Their products are clean and uncluttered. Their ads are usually straightforward and effective. Their trademarks are frequently contemporary. The buildings they inhabit are often distinguished.

Some of these “elite” companies are committed to good design because it is integral to their culture; others simply because a senior manager thinks it’s important. The reasons they support the function are as different as the organizations and the people involved. In our experience, however, two motives seem to surface most frequently.

A commitment to excellence. The deluge of the books on the subject of excellence in recent years have threatened to trivialize the concept and relegate it to the dusty archives where all of last year’s fads and clichés reside. Too bad.

The CEO of one of our clients, now retired, once said, “I’m not smart enough to always know what’s most important so I take the view that everything is equally important. Frequently, I am accused of placing too much emphasis on minor matters. But I have never been accused of not caring enough about the things that really matter.”

Coming from a gifted manager that explanation is both shrewd and attractively self-deprecating. But the fact is that he knew something about excellence that the books failed to adequately establish. It is this: Excellence, buy its very nature, is not selective. You are either committed to it or you ain’t.

The importance of Design as a Marketing tool. Probably the most powerful use of good design occurs when a company uses it to separate itself, its products, its services from the competition. This is only possible because there is so little good design out there or conversely, so much that is bad or mediocre. Isn’t it ironic. that if the general level of design were better, this powerful strategy wouldn’t work?

It was PT. Barnum, the showman and social commentator, who was reputed to have said, “No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” And there have been generations of marketing people who have accepted that aphorism as their creed.

Fortunately in recent years more companies and their leaders have been willing to listen to David Ogilvy’s advice. He said, “The consumer is not a dummy, she is your wife.”

But the rhetorical question with which we began still remains unanswered. Why Design? Here, at great risk, are our answers.

1. Design is a marketing tool that can make your company, products and services distinctive.
2. Design is a manifestation of excellence that is visible.
3. Over time it will encourage superior performance across the boards.
4. It makes an important contribution to improving the quality of our culture.
5. And it makes many of us feel good.

Maybe the best answer, certainly the most succinct, belongs to Thomas Watson. On September 15, 1956, he said:

“Good design is good business.”

by Saul Bass

Just got the new Adobe Creative Suite. Pretty cool so far.

Multi artboards rock.

Playing with processing. Check it out

I am truly free only when all human beings, men and women, are equally free. The freedom of other men, far from negating or limiting my freedom, is, on the contrary, its necessary premise and confirmation.

It is indisputably evident that a great part of every man's life, must be employed in collecting materials for the exercise of genius. Invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previously gathered and deposited in the memory: nothing can come of nothing: he who has laid up no materials can produce no combinations.

A student unacquainted with the attempts of former adventures is always apt to over-rate this own abilities; to mistake the most trifling excursions for discoveries of moment, and every coast new to him for a new-found country. If by chance he passes beyond his usual limits, he congratulates his own arrival at those regions which they who have steered a better course have long left behind them.

The productions of such minds are seldom distinguished by an air of originality: they are anticipated in their happiest efforts; and if they are found to differ in anything from their predecessors, it is only in irregular sallies and trifling conceits. The more extensive, therefore, your acquaintance is with the works of those who have excelled, the more extensive will be your powers of invention; and what may appear still more like a paradox, the more original will be your conceptions.

Sir Joshua Reynolds

Essay by Norman Cousins

Anyone with a passion for hanging labels on people or things should have little difficulty in recognizing that an apt tag for our time is the Unkempt generation. I am not referring solely to college kids. The sloppiness virus has spread to all sectors of society. People go to all sorts of trouble and expense to look uncombed, unshaved, unpressed.

The symbol of the times is blue jeans-not just blue jeans in good condition but jeans that are frayed, tom, discolored. They don’t get that way naturally. No one wants blue jeans that are crisply clean or spanking new. Manufacturers recognize a big market when they see it, and they compete with one another to offer jeans that are made to look as though they’ve just been discarded by clumsy house painters after ten years of wear. The more faded and seemingly ancient the garment, the higher the cost. Disheveled is in fashion; neatness is obsolete.

Nothing is wrong with comfortable clothing. It's just that current usage is more reflective of a slavish conformity than a desire for ease. No generation has strained harder than ours to affect a casual, relaxed, cool look; none has succeeded more spectacularly in looking as though it had been stamped out by cookie cutters. The attempt to avoid any appearance of being well groomed or even neat has a quality of desperation about it and suggests a calculated and phony deprivation. We shun conventionality, but we put on a uniform to do it. An appearance of alienation is the triumphant goal, to be pursued in oversize sweaters and muddy sneakers.

Slovenly speech comes off the same spool. Vocabulary, like blue jeans, is being drained of color and distinction. A complete sentence in everyday speech is as rare as a man's tie in the swank Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel. People communicate in chopped-up phrases relying on grunts and chants of “you know” or “I mean” to cover up a damnable incoherence. Neatness should be no less important in language than it is in dress. But spew and sprawl are taking over. The English language is one of the greatest sources of wealth in the world. In the midst of accessible riches, we are linguistic paupers.

Violence in language has become almost as casual as the possession of handguns. The curious notion has taken hold that emphasis in communicating is impossible without the incessant use of four-letter words. Some screenwriters openly admit that they are careful not to turn in scripts that are devoid of foul language lest the classification office impose the curse of a G (general) rating. Motion-picture exhibitors have a strong preference for the R (restricted) rating, probably on the theory of forbidden fruit. Hence writers and producers have every incentive to employ tasteless language and gory scenes.

The effect is to foster attitudes of casualness toward violence and brutality not just in entertainment but in everyday life. People are not as uncomfortable as they ought to be about the glamorization of human hurt. The ability to react instinctively to suffering seems to be atrophying. Youngsters sit transfixed in front of television or motion-picture screens, munching popcorn while human beings are battered or mutilated. Nothing is more essential in education than respect for the frailty of human beings; nothing is more characteristic of the age than mindless violence.

Everything I have learned about the educational process convinces me that the notion that children can outgrow casual attitudes toward brutality is wrong. Count on it: if you saturate young minds with materials showing that human beings are fit subjects for debasement or dismembering, the result will be desensitization to everything that should produce revulsion or resistance. The first aim of education is to develop respect for life, just as the highest expression of civilization is the supreme tenderness that people are strong enough to feel and manifest toward one another. If society is breaking down, as it too often appears to be, it is not because we lack the brainpower to meet its demands but because our feelings are so dulled that we don't recognize we have a problem.

Untidiness in dress, speech and emotions is readily connected to human relationships. The problem with the casual sex so fashionable in films is not that it arouses lust but that it deadens feelings and annihilates privacy. The danger is not that sexual exploitation will create sex fiends but that it may spawn eunuchs. People who have the habit of seeing everything and doing anything run the risk of feeling nothing.

My purpose here is not to make a case for a Victorian decorum or for namby-pambyism. The argument is directed to bad dress, bad manners, bad speech, bad human relationships. The hope has to be that calculated sloppiness will run its course. Who knows, perhaps some of the hip designers may discover they can make a fortune by creating fashions that are unfrayed and that grace the human form. Similarly, motion-picture and television producers and exhibitors may realize that a substantial audience exists for something more appealing to the human eye and spirit than the sight of a human being hurled through a store-front window or tossed off a penthouse terrace. There might even be a salutary response to films that dare to show people expressing genuine love and respect for one another in more convincing ways than anonymous clutching and thrashing about.

Finally, our schools might encourage the notion that few things are more rewarding than genuine creativity, whether in the clothes we wear, the way we communicate the nurturing of human relationships or how we locate the best in ourselves and put it to work.

Norman Cousins, formerly editor of the Saturday Review is a faculty member of the School of Medicine, University of California at Los Angeles, working in the field of psychoneuroimmunology.

I realize that today is the 4th of October and I am just now getting around to write about my birthday.

It was great!

Jyll ended up throwing me a surprise party. She did a good job at that. I had no idea. In fact it was probably too good of job. I made everyone wait here at the house for almost an hour because I had “all the time in the world”. Anyway Mark called me and asked if I would help him get his mind off the funeral and help him send his Boondocks gift card. So we went and had a great time. We even made up for the fact that we (Mark and Nathan) hit a girl in the face with the air hockey puck. After all the boat rides, go-cart races, and videos games we came home. By the time I had walked home from Mark's house Mark and Nathan had already made it too my house for the surprise. Everybody was there, at least for a short while after I got home. They had kids to put in bed because I was so late. With those that could stay we played games and talked the rest of the night.

It was a really good day.

I just found a great pen. Thanks to Ayumi.

Lately I have been interested in collecting all the good quotes that I here and currently have. So I have made some adjustments to my blog so I now have a favorite quote section. I can record all the quotes in one place and not have a thousand pieces of paper of different sizes in every folder in the house. This also allows for me to share them at the same time.

Hope you enjoy them like I do.

You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.

Civilized man refused to adapt himself to his environment. Instead he adapted his environment to suit him. So he built cities, roads, vehicles, machinery. And he put up power lines to run his labour-saving devices. But he didn't know when to stop. The more he improved his surroundings to make life easier the more complicated he made it. Now his children are sentenced to years of school, to learn how to survive in this complex and hazardous habitat. And civilized man, who refused to adapt to his surroundings, now finds he has to adapt and re-adapt every hour of the day to his self-created environment.

I have been writing a blog for Jyll lately. Because of my programing my blog doesn't have to be written perfectly. I can still get things done. So when I created Jylls I had to make sure it worked perfectly, so now I am jealous of her blog.

Photos of Chloe

Seven pounds twelve ounces.

We are in the hospital now. Jyll woke me up around 3:30am and said her water had broke. I just stared at her for a minute. I knew I should be doing something, but what I could not recall. We had prepared by taking all the parent class. I was sifting through all the information we had learned at the speed of a 1998 dial up modem. After a minute or two I figured things out and we left for the hospital.

I did as my younger brother had counseled and drove as fast as I wanted to take advantage of the excuse. Now we just wait.

This is not an announcement that Jyll has had the baby yet.

We are now in the last week of the pregnancy. I am feeling, what I think you would call, excited. I don't know what to expect. I have always liked kids, there is no doubt that I am excited to have a kid. Just having a kid brings a lot of unknowns. It is those unknowns that I am not sure how to feel about. You could say I don't know what I am exited for, but no matter what comes I am excited.

A DISCOURSE
Delivered to the Students of the Royal Academy, on the Distribution of the Prizes, December 11, 1769, by the President.

Gentlemen,—I congratulate you on the honour which you have just received.  I have the highest opinion of your merits, and could wish to show my sense of them in something which possibly may be more useful to you than barren praise.  I could wish to lead you into such a course of study as may render your future progress answerable to your past improvement; and, whilst I applaud you for what has been done, remind you of how much yet remains to attain perfection.

I flatter myself, that from the long experience I have had, and the unceasing assiduity with which I have pursued those studies, in which, like you, I have been engaged, I shall be acquitted of vanity in offering some hints to your consideration.  They are indeed in a great degree founded upon my own mistakes in the same pursuit.  But the history of errors properly managed often shortens the road to truth.  And although no method of study that I can offer will of itself conduct to excellence, yet it may preserve industry from being misapplied.

You might know already but I have an internship this summer. I am working at Transient Works. It is just Dan Solen the owner and me. I like this combination because of the hands on experience I get from watching Dan operate the company. I get to hear the phone conversations and watch how he prioritizes things. This is a great way to learn how to run my own business if / when that day comes. So far I have been their for about two weeks. I have enjoyed it so far. I think the thing most interesting to me was how different it is from school. I know it would be different but not that much. Maybe I didn't think about it that much before, so my ideas of how it would be weren't thought out.

I have been reading everybody's (Mackenzie's) blog while they are in New York doing their internships. It sounds like they are having lots of fun. It reminds me of moving to New York after we just got married. It makes me miss living back east.

We had a great time this holiday weekend. First my family went to on vacation, which is pretty rare. We only do Sunday dinner, so this was nice. We spent a night in Levan riding four-wheelers, campfire, and games. After that we went to a Jessica's 25th birthday party. It was a formal dinner dance party. The next morning we had breakfast at the Stevenson's house before Church. After Church we had a bar-b-que at their house. Then finally on Monday we rented some bikes and went on a ride up Provo canyon then return to the Thomas' house for dinner and games. The whole weekend was great.

Maybe sometime soon you might see some new flash components on this site. With interviews and internships approaching I need to brush up on my flash skills. So I might add some killer flash elements and some killer animated gifs. I like if I did a lot of both would be good.

Are fruit snacks better for you than gummy bear? Thats what I thought - I still am not sure, but are fruit snacks just gummy bears with better marketing?

The semester started this week. It only hit me today when Adrian said 'thumbnails on Monday'. I wasn't expecting to take summer classes. Adrian recommended this class and how do you excuse it with that recommendation? I have some goals for the summer even with taking class and having a kid. I want to read some books. The one I am currently reading is 'The Screwtape Letters' by C. S. Lewis. Looking at the book it should be a fast read. When you read it often times you have to read it twice. Maybe that is not a problem for most. Either way I am enjoying it. After 'The Screwtape Letters' I want to find a book by Wendall Berry. In class we hear a lot of Wendall Berry from Adrian and I like what I hear. I don't get many chances to read during the regular semesters.

I have been trying to figure out how to create an RSS Feed for my blog. In most cases the RSS is created for you. I have never done a blog before and I had to try and create it from scratch. I thought it would be easy. It would have been if I would have stayed with my original ideas, but I keep adding more features. I get enticed by new ideas and I have to see if I can do it. I think to myself that won't take too long. Then I find out I was wrong and it took twice as long as I thought.

I am writing this with the trouble that I thought I would have with a blog. I don't write much. That being said I wanted to write about the MS Walk my wife and I did. It was pretty cool. All the people that turned out, it was amazing. For those who don't know Jyll has MS, hence the motivation and aware for the walk. It was comforting to know that that many people live normal lives while having MS. You should go to one sometime.